I’ve missed this feature since OmniWeb closed – Safari 16 just brought it back

Today Apple released Safari 16, a major point release that debuts before Ventura. The browser update mainly focuses on things that users can’t see, like security and performance. But there’s one new user-focused feature that’s been on my wish list for almost a decade – sidebar tabs.

Of course, sidebar tabs aren’t a new idea. Microsoft’s Edge offers it out of the box, and Chrome and Firefox both have extensions that enable the feature, and Safari once did too. But the browser that introduced me to the concept – and really ruined the other browser for me given the elegance of its implementation – was OmniWeb.

Twenty years ago, OmniWeb had a sidebar (a “drawer” in Interface Builder parlance) that presented true-to-life thumbnails of open web pages. They updated in the background and could be rearranged by dragging. When the tabs got too numerous, you could collapse them into smaller, plain text buttons. You could refresh the entire stack with just two clicks and see which pages have been refreshed just by looking at the thumbnails. For the web-obsessed in the early 2000s, it was a power user’s dream.

Photo credit: Tim De Chant/TechCrunch

For this crowd, vertical tabs really are the best way. Computer screens have been wider than they are tall for some time, and adding tabs to the side of the window makes better use of that space, allowing users to see more of a webpage’s content. Also, a vertical list is much easier to navigate when the number of tabs gets into the dozens, which happens to me all the time. (The screenshot shows how expanded and collapsed tabs are displayed in OmniWeb 6, which ditched the legacy drawer UI element in favor of a sidebar.)

OmniWeb was arguably the first web browser available for Mac OS X. Before Internet Explorer was bundled with Mac OS X Developer Preview 4, intrepid testers could use OmniWeb for their browsing needs. The app was originally developed for NeXTSTEP, the precursor to OS X, and a beta version was available in 1995. Shortly after OS X developer previews became available, OmniWeb’s developer, OmniGroup, ported the browser.

The story goes on

The app was about the purest Mac OS X experience you could get. It was written in Cocoa, the then new programming language that represented a clear break with the classic Mac OS. User interface elements were in the lickable Aqua theme, and images and text were rendered using Quartz, the new operating system’s compositor. Images were bright and text was clear and smooth. Oh, and it’s not made by Microsoft, but by an indie shop with a long history of developing solid NeXTSTEP and Mac OS software. For Mac addicts like me, that was another strong selling point.

For a few years after the release of Mac OS X, OmniWeb and Internet Explorer were pretty much the only two options for surfing the web. Then Microsoft dropped IE for Mac and Apple decided to get in the game and released Safari in January 2003.

Based on the open-source KHTML rendering engine, Safari was fast and flexible, but lacked the powerful features I expected. It had tabs but I found them bulky. It also lacked workspaces, toolbar search customization, synced bookmarks, and content filtering (with regex!), among other things. I had grown accustomed to them over the years and found them impossible to change.

Fortunately, with OmniWeb 4.5, OmniGroup decided to switch to WebCore on which Safari was based. This gave OmniWeb a new life and kept it more or less relevant through the aughts and into the early 2010s.

In 2009, OmniGroup decided it could no longer devote resources to OmniWeb, which started as a paid app and then transitioned to a free application. Chrome got involved, and most Mac users just stuck with what their computer came with, Safari. OmniGroup had started work on another major release, 6.0, and while it’s still updated today as a passion project, it’s not really a viable daily browser for most people. OmniWeb is mostly dead.

Once I realized the writing was on the wall, I tried a number of different browsers, including Chrome and Firefox, but I’m pretty picky about my user experience (if you couldn’t tell), and neither has met my expectations. Eventually I switched to Safari and relied on a number of hacks to try to bring some of the most popular features with me. It worked well, but it wasn’t the same.

Til today. I feel like my browsing experience is reminiscent of the early Mac OS X days. Over the past year, tab groups have started to help me tame my Safari window overflow, and vertical tabs should further help and centralize tab management in one place. In version 16, Safari still isn’t perfect – I’d still like to have thumbnail previews for each page, and it would be great to turn off the now redundant horizontal tab bar – but it’s a lot closer to ideal than anything else in the last few points years.