Other Sites
Active development of iCab continues, and version 4.1.1 Beta 50 was released on Wednesday - a maintenance update that adds a more refinements and tweaks to the already speedy and solid browser. Note that iCab's interim beta releases are offered only to registered users.One of the coolest new features in the latest iCab builds is the ability to save Web pages as PDF files.
There's not much obvious to notice with these latest iCab betas compared with the current version 4.1.1 final release, but a lot of tinkering has been going on "under the hood." I downloaded beta 50 Wednesday, and it remains a smooth and dependable performer which I'm happy to use for almost any browser task, including online banking, although I still prefer Opera's download manager with it's excellent pause and resume support.
New in iCab since the version 4.1.1 final release:
Changes in Beta 50:
- Workaround implemented for a bug in WebKit which treats the HTTP status code 200 and 204 identical. Now iCab makes sure that WebKit no longer removes the currently displayed page when a status code 204 is received.
- Workaround implemented for invalid URLs which contain space characters in the host name.
- In the "experimental settings" (enter "settings:" in the URL field) registered users can now enable a phishing and malware site detection. This service is provided by Google (and is also used by Firefox) to warn the user when he opens a suspected phishing site or a site that offers some kind of malware. iCab will regularily (approx. every 30min) load/update a list of phishing/malware sites from google to do all these checks, so iCab will never send any information about visited sites to google. Unfortunately this services from google is not yet absolutely reliable. Depending of the current global traffic of the google server that is providing this data, google will only send back small updates of existing phishing/malware lists or even no data at all (when there's high server load) or with luck it sends the complete lists (low server load). When switching on this feature the very first time, all the lists must be completely loaded from google. The phishing list (which is relatively small) seems to be no problem, but the malware list (which is much bigger) can take many attempts to download successfully (it took a few days until I got this list). Google doesn't send such a large amount of data when it server load has reached a certain level, and this level seems to be reached most of the time. The phishing list is probably the most important list for Mac users and the phishing list can be currently loaded without problem from google. So the only problem is the malware list, and because malware works usually only on Windows, the malware list is less important for Mac users. And once the malware list was received the first time, iCab only needs to ask for updates for this list, and the load problem is gone.
- On US keyboards it's now also possible to use Cmd-{ and Cmd-} (Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-]) to switch between Tabs in addition to the existing shortcuts.
Changes in Beta 49:
- In the Information window for Images were iCab lsts the Exif data it was posible to activate the inline editing when double-clicking an item, though these items can not be edited. This could cause a crash later when the window was closed.
- Switching on/off the favIcons from within the "experimental settings" could casue some strange things. The reason for this is that switching on/off the icons could indirectly call certain Cocoa routines from within any thread, but these routines require to be called from the main thread. Now iCab makes sure that the icons will be switched on/off from the main thread.
- When downloading files iCab did not always save the file using the correct file name. This was caused by a new workaround for a bug of MacOSX 10.5. "Leopard". The download classes of Cocoa do suggest a filename for a download under which the file should be saved. Unfortunately, under "Leopard" these filename suggestions do not make always much sense. iCab tried to correct such bad suggestions, but did also "correct" some suggestions which were correct and did not need to be corrected.
Changes in Beta 48:
- The Web-Inspector is now also available through the "Tools" menu. Before it was only available through the contextual menu.
- The max size of the database that can be created by JavaScript code of a web page can be now configured in the JavaScript preferences.
- It is now possible to create a new folder when selecting the Download folder in the "Download" dialog box.
- If the last item of the Bookmarks or History window was found while searching within the bookmarks/history iCab could freeze when deleting this last item and if the search was continued.
- RSS feeds and GeoTags were only searched in the root document of a frame page. Now iCab lokks for this information in all frames as well.
- New settings implemented in the preferences dialog ("General > Other" and "Downloads") to play a sound when a web page has finished loading or a download is completed. This can be especially useful for blind users (and was requested by a blind user).
- In the "Files Overview" window all missing files will be displayed in red.
- Automatcally filling out forms didn't work reliable when the HTML code related to the forms was seriously damaged or invalid. iCab is now more robust when checking such invalid HTML code.
- YouTube delivers videos in MP4 format with the wrong content type "text/html". Therefore the downloaded video file got the wrong file type. Now iCab has a workaround to fix the wrong content-type information from YouTube.
- In the contextual menu there's a new option to search for the selected text in the default search engine. Until now this feature was only available through the main menu "Edit > Find > Find in Internet"
- The GeoTag support now includes some workarounds for Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). Flickr supports geotagging photos, but unfortunately Flickr uses only a proprietary internal solution instead of all the standards and common solutions. Especially Flickr does not save the Geo data in the photos where one would expect to find them. So iCab will now search for the proprietary geo data from Flickr as well.
- Since MacOSX 10.4 iCab is able to show all the Exif data for images. You can get these data by opeing the contextual menu on an image and selecting the menu item "Image > Information". Also in the "File Overview" window of the "Tools" menu, the preview area will list all the Exif data for the selected image.
- When entering the URL "settings:" in the URL field and opeing this page, it's now possible to get access to some "experimental settings". These settings are not available in the preferences dialog. Some of them never will, some may be end up in the preferences dialog later when this makes sense. These experimental settings are usually not (yet) useful for most users, or are not yet fully tested, or are only useful for very special circumstances and normal users should never have to deal with these settings. Currently there're following settings available here:
+ Changing the minimum size of the Tab buttons
+ Switching on/off the "close" buttons in Tabs (affects only new Tabs)
+ TEXTAREA elements can be made resizable (requires WebKit 3, MacOSX 10.4.11/10.5.2)
+ The FavIcons in the Favorites Toolbar can be shown/hidden
+ Enables support for GeoTags in Images (requires MacOSX 10.4. or newer. Currently not very useful because you won't find many geotagged images in the web yet, especially because photo sites like Flickr prefer their own proprietary solution (see above). So at the moment the support for geotagged images should be switched off, if you don't need this information. Switching this setting off will save processor time and memory).
System requirements for iCab 4:
MacOSX 10.3.9 and newer,
MacOSX 10.4.x or 10.5.x is recommended.
System Support:
PPC/Intel
$25 Shareware/Freeware (NagWare)
For more information, visit:
http://www.icab.de/
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Reviews ď Internet Reviews ď
