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The iCab folks have been keeping me busy downloading and installing beta updates, with three released over a four-day period. The reason for the flurry of updates is wringing the bugs out of a significant new iCab feature in Betas 73 through 75, a TopTen pages" view that provides a thumbnail overview (similar to the "Tabs Overview") for your most visited, last visited and favorites pages. Useful and kinda' slick. You access it from the "Navigate" menu. I foud that after some uptime it displays thumbnails in the cells, but they're slow to load over my dialup connection.
Also new are Labels for bookmarks in the bookmarks window, and aew JavaScript filter setting for disallowing JavaScript to "kidnap" Cmd-Clicks. Thre are also some bugfixes and improvements. Note that iCab beta releases are only available to registered users.
I've become accustomed to expecting stability from iCab - final or beta - and version 4.5 has been typically solid and unbuggy, but the Top Ten feature in the beta 73 build did seem to have some raggedyness about it that has been addressed in betas 74 and 75. Because of some limitations of the Apple WebKit browser engine, which iCab is based on, the setting "JavaScript may open new windows without user interaction" didn't always work as expected. Now iCab tries to compensate this by some additional checks.
New in version beta 57:
- Fixes a problem of releaseing the TopTen overview window while thumbnails were loading.
Changes in Beta 74:
- The "settings:" URL didn't work in Offline mode
- The "TopTen" icon in the favorites toolbar can now be switched off in the experimental settings (enter "settings:" in the URL field).
- Closing the TopTen Overview could crash if there were still several overview pages loading data from the internet.
- The "Favorites" section of the TopTen Overview didn't work anymore.
- Now there's a global closer button for the TopTen Overview (though this is not really necessary because the overview can be closed as well when clicking somewhere in the background)
- Using the TopTen Overview does longer adds pages to the history.
- The keyboard shortcut Cmd-1 to open the TopTen Overview can now be also used to close the overview.
- The last beta version appended a small triangle to the label of folders in the favorites toolbar, so the folders can be recognized even when the icon was switched off. Now the triangle can be switched on/off in the experimental settings as well.
Changes in Version 4.5 Betas 73 include:
- Added Labels in the bookmarks window. It's possible to set different colors for the bookmarks.
- It's now possible to set tags for bookmarks folders too.
- There's a new "Top Ten" feature (through the "Navigation" menu and as button at the left of the favorites toolbar), which lists the most visited, last visited or the favorites pages as thumbnails, just like the "Tab Overview" feature.
- New setting in the JavaScript preferences and in the Filtermanager added, to allow/disallow JavaScript code to process Cmd-Clicks. More and more web sites simply "kidnap" all mouse clicks instead of just normal "clicks" in order to do some stuff and therfore prevent that a links can be opened
in a new Tab or window (by Cmd-Clicking on it). With this new setting, the user can decide, if the JavaScript code is able to process all clicks.
- Bugfix: Undo in the Bookmarks window could cause a crash.
- Spellchecking will now be deactivated for the "user defined StyleSheet" text field in the Filter Manager.
- The authentication dialog box is now displayed and processed by iCab itself, instead of letting this handled by WebKit. This makes it possible
that iCab is able to get the Cookies which might be set by the server within authentication challenges.
- iCab now stores the file encoding information into the meta data of files when saving a web page as HTML or text file.
- IRI support can be configured for the URL field and the status bar in the experimental settings. If IRI support is enabled, encoded characters in URLs ("%nn") are interpreted as UTF8 and then displayed as clear text. This can help reading URLs which use such characters, but because not all URLs do use the UTF8 encoding for these characters, this might also cause some issues. This is why this is disabled for the URL field and only enabled by default for the status bar.
- Modified the Icon for a Tab Group in the Bookmarks
- Bugfix: When closing the bookmarks window while editing a bookmarks item, the changes were not saved.
- Saving the bookmarks will be now done in a separate thread. This will avoid small delays when saving extremly large bookmarks lists.
iCab's Download Manager got some tweaks in the Beta 72/Version 4.5 final build, which are appreciated, but unfortunately iCab's Download Manager still doesn't come close to matching Opera's for slickness, convenience, speed, or reliability. I found that while the iCab DLM will resume a paused download (the control labeling could be clearer on these functions, it seemed to have great difficulty in restoring download speeds above a crawl (relatively speaking - I'm on dialup and all download speeds are slow, but iCab's resumed speeds were measured in days for a 25 MB file. By contrast I initiated a download of the same file at the same time in Opera, and was getting a 2 1/2 hours-ish DL time, which is excellent for that size file on my setup. Still plenty of room for improvement of this feature.
Of course there's all the returning iCab good stuff. One thing I love about iCab 4.x builds is that it's lightning starting up - maybe not quite as fast as Safari 4 but pretty speedy. 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 these Version Apple WebKit-based 4.2.5 versions.
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 recent builds of iCab is the Cache Browser that is now available in the Tools menu if you're runnign 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.
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, Now that Omni Group has made their OmniWeb browser freeware, iCab is the last OS X browser 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 pesky little "shareware reminder" box popping up from time to time, but I assure you it is annoying. Also users who have paid for a license are able to get newer (beta) releases of iCab like beta 75 earlier than other users who have to wait for final releases.
System requirements for iCab 4.x:
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: Hot Topics ď Reviews ď Internet Reviews ď
I’ve liked iCab for a long time. Some of their features are easier to use than other browsers.