James Mok’s Soliloquy

Now that I have become a “MacRookie” and got myself the latest model of the “iPoor” wallet in the process, I have been busy prepping my machine to get some workflow going. Among the chores, finding the right web browser has taken me quite some time.

Safari, Camino, Firefox all are OK, but not nearly as powerful as Avant Browser that I am used to in WindOS even though it is just a shell program running IE. Opera came very close, but neither it nor Camino nor Firefox has any built-in spell checker. To be fair, AB doesn’t have one either, but I was able to find a freeware called ieSpell of WindOS as a spell checker for any kind of input field. OS X’s “check spell as you type” is much more elegant but it is only available to Cocoa apps and not to Carbon apps, I suppose.

While busy searching for a similar global spell checker as ieSpell for OS X, I have found none came free, but I have come across OmniWeb browser. It does support OS X’s built-in spell check and it has graphic tabs that show thumbnails of the site page in a tab! They even show the process of background loading so you can see whether a page is finished loading as well as whether it is the page that you may recognize.

What I miss from AB is the auto time preset refresh of tabs for those free news and finance pages which do not update the page themselves, and the opened tabs saved for next session which is available in Opera but Opera is buggy running MovableType.

OmniWeb is not free, but the demo version is almost fully functional without customizable homepage. This is not a big problem, beats reading ads with Opera.

PS. OK, so the “delete” key is the “backspace” key, but where is the “delete” delete key then? Setting up links in MovableType with OS X browser without the URL button is a hassle also.