Charging for a browser was, and never will be, a popular or accepted idea. OmniWebĭespite its best efforts, OmniGroup simply never stood a chance.

It was fast, and free - two things that helped make it what it is today, which is the second most popular browser in the world. Tabbed browsing and the ability to add features to the browser via extensions quickly made Firefox a popular alternative to IE, Navigator and OmniWeb.

In November of 2004, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0, and browsing the web on the Mac has never been the same. The best way to choose is to download them and try them. Which browser is best for you depends on your needs and browser use. Mac Web browsers A quick look at the web browser landscape shows a wide-range of features, speed, and stability. OmniWeb’s popularity exploded, and with it came a (welcome) blistering onslaught of Web browsers available for the Mac. Due to Microsoft’s barely-an-effort port of IE to OS X, and Netscape Navigator suffering from never-ending software bloat, the time was right for other vendors to make their move. It was easily faster than most anything out there, had a slick interface, and boasted features few other browsers offered at the time, such as tabs on the side, per-site preferences, built-in ad-blocking, and more. One of the earliest non-MS/Mozilla browsers was OmniWeb.

But with OS X’s Unix underpinnings, and its sleek new GUI, it wasn’t long until developers started porting old browsers, or releasing all new ones to run on Apple’s shiny new OS. With Mac OS 9 and the early days of Mac OS X, IE was the lean, mean, speed-machine while Navigator was continuing its fast slide to irrelevance. Long-time Mac users probably remember the day when Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the only games in town.

Early mac web browsers