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After 62 beta builds, iCab has released version 4.2.5 final of the iCab Web Browser. Marquee new features in iCab 4.2.5 include new keyboard shortcuts for the Download Manager added, an issue with the preview fo the cache browser fixed and a workaround for a new bug in Mac OS 10.5.5.
One thing that really strikes me about recent iCab builds is that they are lightning starting up - even faster than Safari if my gut impression serves me. Another is that while I've always liked iCab, going back to experimenting with a German-language version back in the late '90s, it's never been more likeable than it is with version 4.2.
iCab is a niche player in the browser world, with less than one percent of the market, but it deserves a wider clientele on merit, and reminds me of long-running ad campaign for a brand of beer here in Atlantic Canada, which claims that "people who like it like it a lot." The same goes for iCab's fiercely loyal cohort of fans, and they have a point. There is an awful lot to like about iCab, which I consider the Mercedes Benz of browsers. It may not be the most potent powerhouse on the Information Highway, but it's a tour-de-force of solid and innovative engineering with a quiality feel.
One new feature in these latest builds of iCab is the Cache Browser that is now available in the Tools menu if you're running MacOSX 10.5 and later. Under Mac OS X 10.3/10.4 the Cache browser is not available because the format of the cache files is unknown under these MacOS versions. The Cache Browser window displays a list of all files that are stored in the web cache, and it's possible to filter out certain items by activating/deactivating the file type buttons or by entering some text. There's also a preview available for all files. Through the contextual menu it's also possible to save the files to disk. Very cool, especially for folks like me who spend a lot of time working offline and are stuck with a slow dialup connection..
Another very cool and handy new feature recently added to iCab is the ability to save Web pages as PDF files.
New in version 4.2.5
New Features:
- New keyboard shortcuts for the Download Manager window:
Control-N New Download
Cmd-I Info for selected download
Space start/stop selected downloads
Bugfixes:
- The preview of the cache browser didn't always work.
- Workaround added for printing web pages with frames. By default WebKit doesn't print Frames pages correctly.
- Workaround added for a new bug of MacOS 10.5.5 (can be configured by entering "settings:" in the URL field). Because of this new MacOSX bug a few web pages with Flash movies do not show the Flash content when they were opened and loaded in a background Tab.
New in iCab 4.2 Compared With The 4.1.1 Final Release:
New Features:
- When saving a web page it's now also possible to save the web page as "stand-alone WebApplication". This creates a real Universal Binary application for this web page. Technically the new application is an iCab browser where many features and GUI elements are removed, and this new "mini iCab" will only display this web site. This is useful for all the Web Applications like "Google Documents" or the new "me.com" Web Applications from Apple which look like normal Desktop applications. When saving these sites as "stand-alone WebApplication" the user can use these WebApplications like ordinary desktop applications, they have their own icon, they can be placed in the Dock, they have their own private preferences, private cookies, private history etc. For example if you use yahoo mail with multiple email accounts, you would need to logout of one account before you can login to another account. If you save the yahoo mail page multiple times as Web Application, each of these copies can be used for a different mail account, and because all the copies do have their own private settings, you can run all these copies at the same time and therefore access all mail accounts at the same time again. You don't need to login/logout anymore.
By default the browser toolbar is switched off in a Web Application, but if required it can be enabled again.
When saving a site as "stand-alone WebApplication" the user can enter the start page and a filter which defines which URLs the web application is allowed to access. Both settings are already filled out by iCab so usually these don't need to be changed. The only thing the user should change is the GUI languages which should be included in the "stand-alone WebApplication". One language must be activated. The more languages are actived the more space is needed for the "stand-alone WebApplication" on disk.
Web-Applications can also use filter configurations for the Filter Manager of iCab. To install a filter configuration in a stand-alone Web-Application just drag the filter configuration file in the Finder onto the Web Application icon in the Finder. For example if you create a Web Application for YouTube, you can install the Video Download filter for YouTube in the Web Application as well.
- In the Security settings of the Preferences dialog iCab can now be configured to warn the user if he/she tries to access phishing or malware sites. This Phishing/Malware protection is only available for registered users and requires an iCab license.
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. iCab will never send any information about visited sites to google. All the checks are done on the computer itself. iCab only has to regularily download the lists of phishing/malware sites from google.
- A Cache Browser is now available in the "Tools" menu. The Cache Browser is only available under MacOSX 10.5 and later, under MacOSX 10.3/10.4 the Cache browser is not available because the format of the cache files is unknown under these MacOS releases. The Cache Browser window displays a list of all files that are stored in the web cache. It is possible to filter out certain items by activating/deactivating the file type buttons or by entering some text. There's also a preview available for all files. Through the contextual menu it's also possible to save the files to disk.
- In the Bookmarks settings it's now possible to activate the synchronization of the bookmarks via WebDAV server. This feature can be useful if the user has multiple computers and wants to keep the bookmarks consistent on all computers. If this feature is active, iCab will save the bookmarks not only on the harddisk of the computer (as usual) but also on the WebDAV server whenever the bookmarks are changed. After launching iCab, iCab will check if the bookmarks on the server are newer then the local copy of the bookmarks and will load the bookmarks from the server if this is the case. To configure the synchronization it's only necessary to enter the URL of the WebDAV server where iCab should save the bookmarks. This must be the complete URL to the (existing) folder on the server. For example "http://www.domain.tld:81/folder/" would tell iCab to save the Bookmarks in the folder "folder" on the Server "www.domain.tld". It's also possible to change the default file name which is used by iCab to save the bookmarks on the server, but the default filename should be usually fine.
Important: The synchronization feature currently only works if only one copy of iCab is running at the same time, or if only one copy of iCab is changing the bookmarks if multiple copies are running at the same time. If multiple copies of iCab are running at the same time and all of them change the bookmarks, only the bookmarks of the copy of iCab which are saved last will survive.
- Under MacOSX 10.4 and newer iCab is able to show all the Exif data for images. You can get this data by opening 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.
- 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.
- 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"
- When iCab is configured for "private browsing" in Kiosk mode, iCab will now use a private Cookie storage for the Kiosk mode which is seperate from the private cookie storage that is used in normal mode. So the cookies which are collected in normal mode are no longer deleted when a new
kiosk session starts or an old session ends. Important: iCab must be configured to use the private cookie storage (which is the default setting) and not the global cookie storage.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Web-Inspector is now also available through the "Tools" menu. Before it was only available through the contextual menu.
- 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.
- The Icon "Add Bookmark" in the browser toolbar will be drawn in two different variations "solid" and "hollow" to show the user if the URL of the current web site is already in the bookmarks (hollow) or if the page is not yet bookmarked (solid).
- It's now possible to add a special Address Book folder in the Bookmarks. This folder will be populated automatically by iCab with all the URLs that can be found in the address book of MacOSX.
- Under 10.4.x or newer a click on the "lock" icon in the status bar that is activated when visiting a secure web site ("https") will display the certificate chain.
- iCab now supports the keyboard shortcuts for the "Snap-Back" feature of Safari:
+ Cmd-Alt-P: goes back to the last "root" page in a window or Tab
+ Cmd-Alt-S: goes back to the last results of a search engine request (which are initiated via search field for example).
- When saving a "Session" iCab will now also save minimized browser windows. When loading the session again, these minimized windows will be still minimized.
- The "field-based" form fill out feature (second tab in the Forms Manager window) can now be activated automatically when a web page has finished loading. So it's no longer necessary to seelct the menu item "Fill out forms".
- In the "Page Layout" ("File" menu) settings there's now an additional settings panel (available through the "Settings" popup button) where you can change the margins which iCab uses when printing.
- When importing bookmarks from other browsers, iCab will now also import the seperator lines.
- In the browser toolbar you can now also insert a combined button for "back" and "forward" only.
- When entering the URL "settings:" in the URL field and opening 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 end up in the preferences dialog later when this makes sense. These experimental settings are usually not (yet) useful for most users, or are only useful for very special circumstances and normal users should never have to deal with these settings. Currently you can change the maximum and minimum widths of the Tabs, hide the "close" box of Tabs, hide textlabel of icon of the favorites buttons, change the font size of contextual menus, change the timeout for network access, print messages about invalid cookies in the console window and enable the use of multiple colors for the URL field.
Bugfixes:
- When printing PDF files which are directly loaded in iCab (not being embedded in HTML code and without a PDF plugin) the WebKit seems to behave very odd. Sometimes it just prints the parts which are visible on the screen instead of printing the whole PDF page. To prevent this, iCab will now search through the internal private view hierarchy of WebKit to locate the PDF view object and print this directly.
- For many top level domains (TLD) the second level domain (SLD) has a special meaning and is used as if it is part of the TLD (for example "co.uk"). This is important for the "Same Origin Policy" that is used for Cookies that should be only accepted from the main document and for the "foreign server" settings/filters of iCab. Some of these special SLDs were not recognized by iCab.
- In the non-German resources of the "file overview" window the contextual menu was not connected.
- Because of a bug in MacOSX it could happen that iCab could use a Cookie that should be already deleted. This could happen in HTTP redirections when the cookie has to be deleted as part of this redirection process. It seems that Cocoa is using a cached copy of the cookie to load the new destination of the redirection even when this cookie is explicitly deleted. Now iCab avoids a certain Cocoa routine to work around this issue.
- When downloading, iCab will now process the HTTP header "Content-Disposition" itself instead of letting this handle the Cocoa classes to avoid some issues of Leopard.
- The Growl notifications "Download Successful" and "Download failed" were mixed up. This was only visible if the user configured Growl to use different layouts for the two notifications.
- Fixed a small bug in the Cookie processing. In rare cases it could happen that a cookie was not accepted even if this cookie was valid.
- 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.
- RSS feeds and GeoTags were only searched in the root document of a frame page. Now iCab looks for this information in all frames as well.
- Automatically 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.
- 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.
- In case the Download folder that was configured in iCab does no longer exist, iCab could no longer download any files. Now iCab will use the default folder (like the Desktop folder) as Download folder if the original one is not found.
If you've never checked out iCab, or it's been a while since you did, give this little browser a look. You may get hooked. The only caveat is that while iCab has pledged from the outset that a free version would always be available, it remains one of the last two browsers (OmniWeb is the other) that requires a software license fee for full support. A single user license of "iCab Pro" costs $25 / 25 EUR. Entering this code in iCab will switch off the "shareware reminder" box. At the moment, the only restriction of the free version is that annoying little "shareware reminder" box popping up from time to time. Also users who have paid for a license are able to get newer (beta) releases of iCab earlier than other users.
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/
Download:
http://www.icab.de/dl.php
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Hot Topics ď Reviews ď Internet Reviews ď
