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I’m a longtime fan and booster of iCab, which I've been using off and on for nearly a decade, since it came on the scene back in 1999 as a Mac port of the existing and successful Atari ST Web browser, "Cab," developed by German programmer Alexander Clauss and Braunschweig, Germany-based software developer Oliver Joppisch. The first version of iCab that I tried (1.0) wasn't even available in an English language port, but that came with version 1.2.
Since the release of iCab version 4.x at the very end of 2007, my iCab usage has been back "on," and it's definitely the best iCab ever, now playing in the same neighborhood speed-wise as Firefox and Safari.
One of the things that appealed about iCab back in 1999 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, which is still a relatively svelte 6.9 MB download for the compressed disk image file.
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.
Another cool feature in iCab is the ability to save Web pages as PDF files.
According to market research stats., iCab enjoys a less than one percent share of the Mac Web browser market, which is a shame because it's an excellent program that deserves wider use. The only major features that I really miss with iCab are a session restore function, which is now included in Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Camino, and conspicuous by its absence in iCab, and resumable downloads, of which my favorite implementation is the one in Opera.
[UPDATE: Reader Thomas informs me that there actually is a sessions save feature in iCab, which apparently has been included for some time. Who knew? Well, not me. :-b
Thomas says that This is the way to activate it:
1. Preferences->General->Advanced Features->Session Features.
2. File menu->Sessions- Autosave Session (or other alternative)
Works great.
Thanks for the heads-up Thomas. I haven't tried it yet, but will keep it activated from now on. One more reason to use iCab.]
New Features of iCab 4.1.1:
- New feature implemented: "Tab Overview".
The "Tab Overview" can be activated from within the "Window" menu or by clicking the new icon at the right side of the Tabs Toolbar in the browser window. The "Tab Overview" requires at least MacOSX 10.4.x. The "Tab Overview" is something like Exposé for Tabs. When activated, all Tabs will be shown as small thumbnail images on top of a dark transparent fullscreen window (like Dashboard). You can easily identify the Tabs, activate another Tab and also delete Tabs. This can be done either using the mouse but also using the keyboard: Tab/Shift-Tab and the arrow keys can be used to select a new Tab, the "Return", "Enter" or "Space" keys can be used to activate the selected Tab, the "Backspace" or "Delete" keys will close the selected tab and the "ESC" key will close the "Tab Overview" itself.
- iCab recognizes geo-tagged web pages. The status bar now has an additional icon which indicates if the currently displayed web page is geo-tagged via META tag. Clicking the icon will then open a popup menu where the location is displayed in plain text (if provided by the web page) and when selecting the menu item in the popup menu the location is shown in google maps (At the moment the popup menu of this GeoTag icon will only have one menu item. Later it may have additional menu items for geo-tagged images or other geo-tagged media that is found in the web page).
- In the Filter Manager there's a new text field in the "Page Layout" panel where CSS code can be entered that will be applied to the web pages which are addressed by the filter. The new advertising filter which you can find in the iCab archive uses this new field to filter out the ad banners of the mactechnews.com web site. So you should replace the old advertising filter by the new one if you're using this filter.
- New setting added in the "Special websites" section of the "Forms Manager". It's now possible to change the form checks to be less strict. This way filling out forms can be made as comfortable as in other browsers (but also as insecure as in other browsers).
- Using MacOSX 10.5.x the contactual menu of the browser will now also include menu items to search the text selection in the "Dictionary" and in "Spotlight".
- In the URL completion preferences it is now possible to configure which URL schemes iCab should use for the URL completion feature and which schemes it should ignore.
- The contextual menu in the browser window can now be also opened by holding down the left mouse button for a while, if this feature is enabled in the Preferences dialog in the "General > Contextual Menu" panel. The standard way to open the contextual menu (Right-Click or Control-Click) does always work.
- It's now possible to enter Cmd-Return, Cmd-Shift-Return, Cmd-Alt-Return and Cmd-Alt-Shift-Return in the URL field and Search field of the browser toolbar to open the URL or search result in a new window or Tab in the background or foreground.
- Syntax hilighting for the source code window implemented
- Colors and bold face text in the error report window help to find the important keywords.
- The HTML attributes "cite" and "longdesc" are now also listed in the "Link Manager" window.
- Double-clicking in the background of the Tabs toolbar will now also create a new Tab.
- When searching in the History window iCab will now also search in closed folders, opening them automatically when needed.
- When loading files from a local disk ("file:" URLs) iCab will now show a "proxy" icon in the titlebar of the window. Control-Clicking or Cmd-Clicking the proxy icon will display a popup menu where you can access all the parent folders of the local file, so it's very easy to locate the file in the Finder..
- Added a new option in the Tabs settings to swap the keyboard shortcuts for new windows and new Tabs. Before this shortcut swap was bound to the option "Open Tabs instead of Windows". Now these are individual settings. This way you can get the same shortcuts as in Safari (which doesn't have the option "Open Tabs instead of Windows").
- In the Network settings you can now configure if iCab should process FTP links itself or if the external FTP application that is configured in the system as default FTP application is called instead to process the FTP link.
- When loading Session files iCab will now (optionally) ask if it is OK to overwrite the current session with the one from the file or if the current session should be saved before the file will be loaded. This confirmation can be enabled/disabled in the "General" preferences in the "Other" tab.
- Javascript code is now able to use databases (via "window.openDatabase()")
- When saving a web page, iCab will now also offer to save it as PDF file. So it is no longer necessary to use the "print" command to save it as PDF file. Using the "save" command is much more intuitive.
- The "YouTube Video Download" filter from the folder "Filter Manager Examples" is improved now. It will now offer to download the video as Flash movie or as MP4 movie (though the MP4 format is not yet available for all videos). So when you're already using the Youtube download filter you should import the new filter again to replace the old one.
- The new keyboard shortcut Control-Alt-T can be used to switch on the Tabs Toolbar when it is hidden (for example because the window only contains one single document and iCab is configured to hide the Tabs toolbar in this case). The shortcut can be useful if the user wants to drag the document of this window as Tab into another window to combine the two windows into a single one.
- iCab now supports the ".url" files of Internet Explorer (Windows or Mac version). These files are the windows counterpart of the "webloc" files on the Mac.
- French translation added (Thanks to Pierre Rudloff)
- Help is now available in English as well.
Bugfixes:
- When explicitly opening a link in a window by the user the "Referrer" information gets no longer lost.
- The "Save" button in the PDF view (a PDF document is opened without any PDF plugin) does work now in iCab as well.
- When changing the titles of bookmarks in the Favorites folder of the Bookmarks window, iCab didn't update the Favorites toolbars immediately.
- JavaScript bookmarkslets can now open windows even when the JavaScript setting "open windows without user interaction" is unchecked.
- Bugfix for the shareware reminder dialog box which could cause a crash in very rare circumstances under MacOSX 10.4.x.
- The error report feature didn't always select the right location in the sourcecode when showing the error location. This happened only when the source code contained some Unicode characters from a "higher" Unicode code page.
- If the Force-Quit-Command was disabled in the Kiosk preferences, which also disables Exposé and Dashboard, Exposé and Dashboard were not enabled again when the Kioks mode was left.
- Small adaption to the new WebKit release (Safari 3.1) where the click with the third mouse button (middle button) didn't work anymore. Now iCab hooks itself into internal WebKit structures to get such clicks again.
- When the user edits the URL of a finished download to repeat the same download with a different URL, some internal Download settings did not reflect the new URL immediately.
- If the option "Stack windows" is enabled in the Window preferences, iCab will no longer remember the sizes of all the open browser windows. This is only done when this setting is switched off.
- When quitting iCab while downloads are still running, iCab now asks the user if iCab should really abort the downloads and quit.
- Asking for the number of windows in AppleScript did also take the closed and invisible windows into account. This doesn't happen anymore.
- The "Search" window will now always on the active "Screen" when "Spaces" of Leopard is active.
- Bugfix for the Error report. iCab could crash if an external CSS file was completely empty.
- When imported bookmarks files did use an invalid text encoding, bookmark titles with non-ASCII characters could be imported with an empty title instead. Now iCab will try out different encodings and if none will result in valid text, iCab will just remove the invalid characters and keep the rest.
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)
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.
For more information about iCab or to download available versions, visit:
http://www.icab.de/
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Hot Topics ï Reviews ï Internet Reviews ï
