ICab
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Lowercase Template:Infobox Software2 iCab is a highly-configurable web browser for the Macintosh by Alexander Clauss, currently (January 11, 2006) in beta development stage.
Three versions are currently supported: one for legacy 68000-series (68k) processors; one for the classic Mac OS running on PowerPC processors (see List of Macintosh models grouped by CPU); and a Carbon application for Mac OS X. All of these are available for free download, and at a later date a non-free Pro version is planned for release. iCab is one of very few browsers being developed for Mac OS 9 and earlier OS versions, and is the only one available for 68k systems that features tabbed-browsing.
iCab's proprietary rendering engine was often criticised for not supporting CSS and DOM, making it hard to design modern Web pages for the browser. However, in May 2005 the first public beta of iCab 3 was released with dramatically updated layout capabilities (including CSS2 support), although this version is not available for 680x0-Macs. The iCab 3 beta series also has proper Unicode support, using ATSUI instead of the old WorldScript; this is the reason for iCab 3 requiring Mac OS 8.5 or later.
Features
One interesting feature of iCab is the iCab-Smiley. Depending on the validity of the HTML of the web site currently viewed, it will smile or look grim. Clicking on the smiley will bring up a list of errors in the page, if there are any. Shift-click the smiley to activate an Easter egg.
iCab also boasts the following features:
- tabbed browsing;
- JavaScript and CSS2 support;
- multiple language support, including Arabic on older Macs (cannot display UTF-16 pages);
- filtering: the Filter Manager allows for sophisticated filtering of images (e.g. ads), plugins, rendering and network settings, JavaScript, and cookies on a per-wildcard-URL basis for powerful control over how you see and use the Web;
- kiosk mode: full screen display and access controls;
- download manager: lets you start, stop, resume and review downloads and maintains a download history; it supports downloading a whole page or a site at once with flexible extension, file type, count and total size filters;
- portable web archives: ability to save pages as a ZIP archive containing HTML and images;
- passes the Acid2 test
Many users consider iCab to be a very intelligent and thoughtful piece of software, with its many nice touches to make the browsing process easier and faster. For example, you can ask iCab to reload missing images on a page (instead of the reloading the entire page), stop animated GIFs on the current page (or in general), switch off background audio on pages, and select which browser you wish iCab to pretend to be (for sites that do not recognise iCab).
Unlike some other browsers, the history window shows columns for title, last access and URL (the last two are optional) and you can sort the window by any column; this makes finding sites you have been to much easier. The Hotlist (favourites) supports automatic and manual checking for site updates and can show you which sites have changed since last visit.
iCab is most often criticised for the following:
- worse performance than the Gecko- and WebCore-based browsers;
- worse stability than its competitors;
- rather a Classic Mac OS look and feel;
- insufficient compatibility/tolerance with more intricate JavaScript-powered web sites.
These flaws may be acceptable for a beta version, which iCab actually is. Although its critics argue that having been in beta/preview for seven years (as of 2006) is too long, iCab has gained quite a large and loyal user base during this period. The main cited reasons for choosing iCab are:
- its considerable power at letting the visitor control their view of the Web instead of the sites controlling them — it is very much suited to nerds, geeks and power users;
- it is the only browser still being developed for legacy Macintoshes. The Mozilla website actually recommends that Mac OS 9 users should switch to iCab.