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iCab is Back.

I

iMac600

68020
http://www.icab.de/

Now up to version 4.0... and wow. It's a lot better. It's been completely rewritten in Cocoa and now supports tabbed browsing, plugin management, customizable user agents (including dynamic, eg. if a site needs IE it will identify itself as IE) and a lot more.

Unfortunately it no longer runs under classic Mac OS.

I took it for a run around YouTube and watched a few videos, then head off to the Acid2 test where it passed with flying colours. It even worked with the heavy level AJAX that MacHeist uses. I think iCab is back, while it isn't on the same level as some of the big contenders, it is definitely a contender back in the browser space.

It does make me wonder though, is this a seriously improved iCab rendering engine, or has it jumped ship to WebKit?

Screenshot

Be interesting to see just how iCab goes as we head into the future, particularly with the new "Web 2.0" standards we're seeing today.

EDIT: Alright, moved to software, if anyone actually reads down this far. :p

 
I was under the impression that it always supported tabbed browsing. At least it does in versions 2.x that I run on my Quadra 650.

Love the new interface for OS X. Very cool and minimalistic.

 
You're right, I just checked and tabbed browsing is nothing new. Seems to work a lot better now though.

The toolbar comes with more buttons than that, including forward, back, refresh, increase text size, decrease text size, print, add bookmark, add bookmark folder, etc. You can easily customize it though.

Should also mention the bar below the toolbar is the bookmarks bar, I just don't have any items there.

 
He updated 3.0 as well. I wonder what improvements are in there. I don't expect that 2.9.9 will ever be updated, though.

 
As much as I would like to see a diversity of rendering engines, if it is OS X only I don't see much of a point in maintaining a rendering engine unless you want to provide legacy support or unique features. Given that this requires 10.3(.9) and later, the legacy support part is done-in.

 
Aye, looks like webkit - when executed, iCab loads /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework

That, and the iCab browser itself is 2MB. Not to take anything away from iCab itself though - the rendering engine is one thing, how it handles throwing around pages via tabs/bookmarks/content blocking & restrictions - that makes the big difference.

Now porting webkit to 68ks... no. mustn't think about it :D .

Dana

 
The only thing IMHO iCab had for it was a unique rendering engine - even though it was imperfect it was unique. iCab 4 loses this unique identity - anybody can take WebKit and slap on extra filtering features.

 
The only thing IMHO iCab had for it was a unique rendering engine - even though it was imperfect it was unique. iCab 4 loses this unique identity - anybody can take WebKit and slap on extra filtering features.
Click to expand...
Uniqueness can be a liability, too. For me, the two big things iCab has always had going for it were the "smiley" (built-in HTML validation is a boon to developers) and the LINK navigation.

 
The only thing IMHO iCab had for it was a unique rendering engine - even though it was imperfect it was unique. iCab 4 loses this unique identity - anybody can take WebKit and slap on extra filtering features.
Click to expand...
Compatibility with standards is more important. If that means using the same tools and techniques that everyone else does rather than being a rebel, then that's how it has to be.

 
Compatibility with standards is more important. If that means using the same tools and techniques that everyone else does rather than being a rebel, then that's how it has to be.
Click to expand...
Agreed, in general. But if the codebase now shared by all the browsers becomes moribund and unmaintainable, it would be nice if an unrelated effort was working in parallel on a rival system. Diversity is good. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

 
Another reason to have a different rendering engine, javascript engine, and so forth, is security. The way things stand today, almost every browser is based upon one of three engines. So it wouldn't take much effort to wipe out the web if someone (or some nation) really wanted to.

 
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