OmniWeb is very stable for most people that run it. Some do tend to
experience crashes and we are gathering information on these so that
we might correct the problems for future releases. On our
OmniWeb-Users mailing list recently one user reported excessive
crashing and at least 5 other people responded to say that they are
able to run OmniWeb for days without a single crash. We get email
from people all the time raving about the stability of OmniWeb, how
people use it on their laptops which they never reboot and they keep
OmniWeb open for days on end. I can tell you with all honesty I use
OmniWeb all day, every day, and I very rarely experience a crash
personally.
A large number of the crashes that our users experience tend to be
because of JavaScript. For version 4.1 we replaced our older
JavaScript engine which was licensed from Netscape in 1997 with the
newer code from the Mozilla project (known as SpiderMonkey). We did
not anticipate too many problems integrating the engine but it
turned out that there were many. Most of them were related to the
fact that Mozilla is very single-threaded and OmniWeb on the other
hand is extremely multi-threaded (the code is not completely
thread-safe). We fixed most of the problems before we released 4.1
but there are a few other bugs here that remain. Obviously, fixing
these is a high priority for us.
One other common source of crashing is/was due to a bug in Mac OS X.
It can affect all applications that are written using Objective-C
(as OmniWeb is) and Apple is aware of the issue. (It may in fact
already be corrected.)