Checking my site stats I see that a bit over 1% of the visits are done with iCab. Since that’s what I use to post and check the site, I’m guessing that on many days nobody else is using iCab to visit. As it has become a very nice web browser, that’s a shame.

There are a number of contributing factors to the low iCab use. Partly is has to be because there are so many other good browsers that get a lot more press. In most cases Windows offers more choices in any product category. Not web browsers. Safari, Apple’s default browser is pretty nice. The four Gecko based options: Firefox, Camino, Mozilla(SeaMonkey) and Netscape, all work well. Safari WebKit has been built into OmniWeb and Shiira, as well as numerous no browser products allowing us to browse web pages in outliners, RSS readers and web text editors and Mail. And, there’s Opera, another good but under used browser. That doesn’t even count Internet Explorer for Mac, which is a better browser than Internet Explorer for Windows.

Another reason that iCab isn’t used much is that fact that it has been in beta for years and years. I remember trying a version of iCab on my old Performa 6500, which I replaced five or six years ago. That’s a long time to not finalize iCab. It may hold the world’s record for a functional product that has gone the longest and never reached commercial release.

I don’t know what is needed before the iCab people decide it is ready. It has been stable for me. All the functions seem to work. It is fast and renders modern CSS designed web pages beautifully. It may be some German desire for absolute perfection. Who knows? I have no problem recommending it.

I had iCab on my hard drive just to check web pages in it. Then I thought that it would make a good dedicated browser to use for maintaining this site. My Firefox bookmarks folder is totally overstuffed and I thought to start fresh and only bookmark, which iCab calls Hotlist the sites directly related to this site, like my server control panel, my visitor statistics pages, the WordPress administration and so on.

However, I find that the more I use it the more I like iCab. It has extensive Preferences that let me customize my browsing experience. It blocks ads and popups well. It has extensive contextual menus. iCab does tabs. It has several included skins. And it will display Page Source in an external text editor of my choice, making it much easier to see the underlying HTML of pages. I know, that’s something only a web designer would love, but, hey, that’s me.

There are some other features that are perfect for designers:

• iCab records all HTML errors of Web pages. A smiley will show if the HTML code is OK, the smiley will be green and smiling. Errors make the smiley red and sad. By clicking the smileys iCab will open a window where all the found errors are listed with a small description.
• Portable web archives. HTML pages can be stored in a compact ZIP-file, including all images of the page.
• Download manager HTML pages can be downloaded including all the linked pages (the depth can be configured), so that one can later access these contents off-line.

Something else that iCab offers that seems neat is a Kiosk mode. I’ve never needed it but it still seems cool.

And iCab is the only modern browser that will still run on pre-OS X Macs.

iCab 3.0 Beta 382 is available for MacOS 8.5 and newer and MacOSX 10.1 and newer in different languages. Theoretically there will be a free and pro version of the browser, if it ever goes final. I’m not holding my breath.

publisher: icab

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 12:17 am and is filed under Browsers, Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.