iCab X 4.0.1 Browser Mini Review
Yesterday iCab 4.0.1 was released, the developers citing but not specifying comprehensively "many new features and bugfixes." However, after downloading iCab 4.0.1 (still a civilized 6.3 MB for the compressed file), I can attest to the improvement claims being more than hype. I quite liked iCab 4.0, which was released on New Years Eve, and marked a great improvement in performance over iCab 3.x. However, the developers Alexander Clauss. and Oliver Joppisch have found ways to inject even more rabbit elixir into version 4.0.1, and while I have conducted no formal benchmarking, after putting 4.0.1 through its paces over a several-hour Web session last evening, my gut tells me that it's now playing in the same league speed-wise as Firefox and Safari.New in iCab 4.0.1:
* The GUI is now available in the following languages: Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, English
* Since MacOSX 10.4.11 the "Web Inspector" is now available
* Since MacOSX 10.5 there are new menu items for PDF files in the contextual menu available
* Since MacOSX 10.4.11 TEXTAREA fields in web pages can be resized
* It's now possible to use small icons in the browser toolbar
* Language-specific quote characters are now supported
* Many other improvements
* Many bugfixes
The download file has grown from 3.8 MB for version 4.0 to 6.3 MB, so one can assume that there has been extensive tweaking, and it has paid off in the speed department.
I've always been a fan of the little German indie browser from the time I first checked it out before there was even an English language localization. One of the things that appealed back in the day was its small size and low hardware demands — qualities that I'm happy to report have been sustained with this Universal Binary release of iCab. I am especially impressed with the responsiveness of this 4.0.1 build. I'm running my 1.33 MHz G4 PowerBook mostly in processor speed Reduced mode these days in aid of keeping the cooling fans silent in OS 10,5,2 Leopard, so I'm probably working as about 667 MHz, and iCab's low processor overhead is appreciated.
The original iCab interface was clean and uncluttered, and in place of IE's and Netscape's somewhat pretentious animated logos at the upper right of the browser window, iCab featured a little animated cartoon car (cab) driving through the window blowing puffs of cartoon smoke. A nice, light-hearted, self-effacing touch, although it has been gone since iCab 3. I miss the little taxi, bit iCab 4's contemporary-looking black on grayscale interface theme.is attractive and functional enough, but still distinctive. Here are the navigation buttons, which have a somewhat innovative configuration.
iCab has had a great feature set from the get go. It was highly configurable with what was and arguably still is the best Preferences in the industry, and its save function was also top-notch, with the ability to save Web archives as well as html files and plain text. iCab has also always had a good downloads manager, and was one of the first browsers to support tabbed browsing, with the best implementation of tabs in the browser category, and Bookmarks,,,,sorry... the Hotlist are easily and intuitively manageable.
There's also the ineffable quality of "feel." I've always liked the user experience with iCab. It was small, fast, lean and nimble - everything Netscape of the day and Internet Explorer weren't. Some complained that the appearance theme was antiquated, but I always thought it sort of charming, and iCab was one of the first browsers to support appearance theme skinning, with a variety of downloadable themes offered on the iCab Website.
iCab 4.0 has been completely rewritten and is now based on Cocoa instead of Carbon with iCab 3. The preferences have been cleaned up, with some old ones removed and some new added. The filter manager also has a completely new structure.
iCab 4 uses the Cocoa file formats wherever possible, some files from iCab 2/3 can not be used in iCab 4 anymore. iCab 4 can read/write Safari WebArchives and also iCab WebArchives. Certain features like creating Session archives will work only with iCab WebArchives because Safari Webarchives can only store a single page.
iCab 4's Find dialog is no longer modal, so it can be left open all the time. Searching the Internet can be done using the "search" field in the toolbar and even in the URL field (for example by entering "g keyword" to search for "keyword" at Google).
There's no longer a separate location toolbar. The URL field is now placed in the standard toolbar together with all the other toolbar buttons.
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 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:
* Mac with G3, G4, G5 or Intel processor
* Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer. Mac OS X 10.4.x or 10.5.x is recommended (a few details won't work under 10.3.9)
For more information about iCab or to download available versions, visit:
http://www.icab.de/
Charles W. Moore
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