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Okay, this is a very odd title for an article, but before you get the flamethrowers fired up, hear me out.

Let's get one thing straight: I've never liked OmniWeb. I downloaded the latest beta for OmniWeb 5, and I still hate it. I may always hate it. But that's a good thing. Because I don't want all applications to solve a problem exactly the same way. It's bad for the applications I do like and use, and it's bad for the platform.

Because, even if I don't like some of the results, diversity is good.

First, I have tried to like OmniWeb. Really. I wanted to like it.

It's very pretty. There's no denying the inherent...well...prettieness of the application. There's a lot of UI love in OmniWeb.

But to me it's like being nibbled to death by baby ducks. The wrapping of the favorites links in the window. I hate that. If I make my window smaller horizontally, I shouldn't lose vertical space. But I do.

The preferences are tedious beyond words....click a pref, change a setting, click show all to get to the next pref. Or you can just click the arrows that rotate you through prefs. How nice.

I hate the way it uses drawers for everything, I despise its bookmarks implementation, and I really hate the new tabs. I don't want space that I can use for what I really want to look at lost to a bunch of over-Quartzed web page thumbnails. The whole "save workspace" thing is lost on me because I haven't changed my browser "workspace" in years, nor do I plan on it. I never know what the heck I'm going to do with the browser until I need to use it.

And so on.

But I'm not going to tell you, or Omni what I want changed. Because I don't want OmniWeb to become Safari or Mozilla or Firefox, (or whatever the hell it's called today). We already have those applications, we don't need clones of them. I want it to continue to apply it's own unique take on the browser problem. I may never use or even like Omni's take on tabbed browsers, but maybe someone will look at that and say "Hey, I hate that implementation, but what if I did something else with it?"

I mean, opinion aside, it's a pretty neat take on tabs, and for a lot of folks, Omni's version of tabs is going to make their lives a lot easier, where some other implementation wouldn't. I may hate it, but I have to respect the innovation there.

That's what diversity is all about: skinning the cat in a new way, which leads to other new ways. It's a real benefit to any platform. And not just with web browsers. I like Microsoft Word, but I'm glad that AbiWord finally got a proper Aqua interface. Because it may help out a lot of people that were just never going to use Word. They may be able to do something really cool because they finally got a tool they can use. A too they wouldn't get without a willingness to be different.

So yes, I hate OmniWeb, and I hope I hate it for the next ten years, and I hope I hate it in large quantities, and I hope it never changes so much that I would like it. I hate OmniWeb because it's different, but I love OmniWeb's difference. Because without it, I might not see a change to something I do like that would be very cool for me.

I love the diversity that OmniWeb brings to the browser table, because without diversity, the platform stagnates, and eventually dies of terminal boredom.

And I'd hate that a lot more than I hate OmniWeb.

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