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iCab 2.95 represents the most substantial upgrade of this lightweight but powerful browser since the OS X version got some heavy refinement over a year ago. iCab has had probably the longest gestation period of any Mac software application I can think of, and it's not finished yet, but happily, it has been a very stable and usable browsing platform since its very early beta days. It's the browser I usually open first after a reboot, and the one I use most for doing work on the Web. 
The big enhancement with version 2.9.5 is tabbed browsing, and the iCab folks have done an especially nice job, incorporating the best functionality of the tabbed browsing features in both Safari and Mozilla/Netscape, and adding the mosy intuitive and customizable tabbed browsing preferences of any browser. Nice Job. If you have a mouse with three (or more) mouse buttons you can use the third button to open links in new Tabs. This is the fastest and easiest way to open web pages in Tabs because you don't need to press any other modifier keys. This works only under MacOSX. In the Classic MacOS versions you have to configure the mouse driver of your 3-button-mouse to get the same functionality. 
You can bookmark all of the Tabs of a window as "Tab group". The "Tab group" is similar to a folder in the Hotlist, but will handled as a single item in the hotlist menu or in the favorited toolbar. Opening such a tabgroup will open all Tabs of the group at once. In the hotlist window you can also modify Tab groups at any time; you can add web pages or remove pages for example. The user interface has also received a revamp, with smaller icons as default (larger still configurable), a convenient search engine field (Yahoo! is default), customizable toolbars, and a cleaner, more attractive interface theme. I like the look, and iCab is now second only to OmniWeb in appearance to my sense of aesthetics -- much more pleasant-looking than Safari's ugly "brushed metal" theme. Under Mac OS X you can also select from several different icon sets. All search engines which are configured in the "Internet search engines" settings of the preferences dialog can be directly accessed using the search field. Using the popup menu on the left of the search field you can select the search engine you want to use. There is also a new autocomplete feature in the URL location field. After entering some characters in the field a popup menu will list all known matching URLs. Toolbar elements can now be dragged & dropped. To customize the Navigation toolbar, choose the menu item "Customize Navigation Toolbar" from the View menu or choose the menu item "Customize Toolbar" from the contextual menu of the Navigation toolbar. In the bottom part of the window all of the icons that can be placed in the Navigation Toolbar will be shown. Just drag the icons into the toolbar where you want to have them located. There's also a default icon set provided, which you can also drag into the toolbar. You can drag the "globe" icon on the left side of the URL field to insert the URL into document windows of other applications, or to save location files in the finder or to insert the URL in the Hotlist window or in the favorites toolbar etc. You can either use a seperate location toolbar (which contains the URL input field and a search field) or you can place URL and search field directly into the Navigation Toolbar. But you can't have URL and search fields in both toolbars at the same time, so if you've configured iCab to use a seperate location toolbar, the URL and search fields will be removed from the Navigation toolbar. The back and forward icons of the Navigation toolbar do now also have a history menu attached. Based on a couple of days of use, I would have to say that iCab is still not quite as fast as Mozilla (either 1.4 or FireBird) or Safari, but it's no slouch. CSS support is still not finished, which can make the rendering of pages with heavy CSS coding render badly or not at all. I find this a minor inconvenience, and just switch to another browser if I encounter it. The next, larger update (iCab 3.0) will include much better implementation of CSS. New CSS implementation requires many internal changes and modifications. Parts of these changes are already finished in iCab 2.9 (albeit not visible, other than the increased speed of iCab), and will be in iCab 3.0, and will make iCab much more compatible with most web pages again. Indeed, all the features of the 2.9.5 releases were planned for iCab 3.0, but because so many people asked for tabbed browsing support, and Tabs were already implemented and working, iCab decided to release another version before the iCab 3.0 release. Returning iCab features include:
Preferences Dialog
Blocking advertising
Kiosk mode
Error protocol (Smiley)
Portable web archives in ZIP format
Download manager
Link manager
Source code manager
No system extensions (Classic Mac OS versions)
Open web page in new window or tab
I love iCab, and version 2.9.5 is the best iCab yet. It's only a 2 MB - 2.5 MB download (depending on version), so there's little reason not to check it out.
New in the iCab 2.9.5 release:
System Requirements
iCab X is free betaware
For more information, visit:
From Peter da Silva "The current state of my thinking on this topic is that OS 9's user interface is still the best that has ever been developed for a personal computer OS -- head and shoulders above OS X or any other OS GUI" Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts: sometimes it's command-click, sometimes shift-click, sometimes option-click. Poor keyboard navigation: you can only tab to text input fields. OS X fixed this, well, for some apps. Still doesn't work in Safari. Clumsy "control-click" for context menus. Context menus are poorly organized: they're shortcuts, so anything available in the CM should be available in the regular menus. OS X makes this worse, of course, by throwing the NeXT "Service" menu in so now you have two incompatible sets of DIFFERENT context menus. No "run" menu, so you end up with launch icons scattered over your desktop. Error dialogs still full of arbitrary and confusing numeric codes years after a table of error messages would take up 0.00001% of RAM. Mac OS started out with a pretty consistent user interface with its limitations readily understandable: it had to fit into 128K, for heavens sake! But that was nearly 20 years ago... Windows was doing a better job of the basic UI in 1990 (not that Windows is all that hot as an OS, but that *is* one of its strengths even now after Windows 95/98/XP muddued the waters). No, no, there's a long way to go. I just wish Apple would give an indication that they knew where they needed to go. Alas, OS X only has a few improvements and some nasty regressions.
I haven't used Windows a lot, but have never perceived it as being very user-friendly -- nothing that enticed me to explore it further.
The beauty of the Classic Mac OS UI is its flexibility (facility for letting you do things YOUR way, usually with several different modalities available), it's intuitiveness, relative simplicity, and spatial stability and predictability.
I've never been a big user/fan of contextual meus. Launch icons? - keep them in a popup folder displayed as one-click buttons. Makes a slick launcher. ;-)
However, different (key)strokes.....
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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