August 21, 2000

4:10 PM

iCab 2.1 is outThe fabbest little Web browser for adherents of the Macintosh religion, iCab, is now out in version 2.1. It lacks any CSS support, and JavaScript support is very poor, but for a program written from scratch by one or two people (Alexander Clauss seems to be the lead), it's astounding. Absolutely full support for HTML 4 – every extended character (iCab seems to use its own font), weirdo tags like LONGDESC, ACRONYM, and ABBR, TITLEs on everything (no popups: text appears in status line). Filter out ads automatically. Only browser other than Lynx that handles metadata like LINK REL="next". The damn thing validates your code for you (click the smiling or frowning icon at the right of the address bar). And so on. And so on. I love this program. And yes, I'm in the minority. What else is new?
posted by joeclark (4 comments total)

iCab is what I hoped Mozilla was going to be--small, fast, customizable, and friendly. The most impressive thing about iCab, IMHO, is that every single release has been usable for daily browsing, ever since preview release 1.0. Even in its incomplete state, it's more than a match for Netscape 4.x.y.z.p.d.q.foobar (I still remember the first table-heavy page which rendered instantly in iCab), and even exceeds IE5/Mac in some areas.

My favorite thing about iCab is its incredible customizability. Paranoid about referrer headers? Turn 'em off. Don't like popups? Just say 'scripts can't open windows'. Hate small text? Tell it to ignore font size changes. Want to change your user-agent string? Right in the preferences, no hacking necessary. This is a browser with security and privacy built right in. And the compressed archive *fits on a floppy*.
posted by darukaru at 9:24 PM on August 21, 2000

(I have a PC.) Personally, I love Opera...I gave it a try a few months ago, but didn't like it. Finally, I got sick of opening IE on my aging computer, and decided to give Opera another try. It's not without its quirks and I have my complaints, but overall it's a very nice piece of software. Now if only it was free...
posted by gleemax at 10:19 PM on August 21, 2000

neat, I'm going to check it out.... but mozilla's seamonkey actually works now, and quite well I must say.
posted by greyscale at 7:55 AM on August 22, 2000

Comparing iCab to the milestone builds of Mozilla is embarrassing (if you're a Mozilla supporter) and probably pointless. With the exception of some scripting functions that don't work perfectly yet, nothing in iCab prevents you from using this on a daily basis as a browser; the M17 build of Mozilla is so slow it's not usable.
posted by m.polo at 8:59 AM on August 22, 2000