iCab 3.0 Beta: the 'Alternative' Browser


In all the excitement over Safari and FireFox, people have seemingly paid insufficient attention to yet another Mac browser alternative - iCab.

iCab is available for free (a paid version for $29 will be available ultimately when the iCab project reaches completion), and it originally started off to be 'small, lean and fast', in marked contrast with the bloat and sluggishness of IE and Netscape at the time. It's also still built in OS X and OS 9 versions, and you can use older versions just fine on ancient Macs running OS 7x/8x, as iCab retains a small RAM footprint.

Even the current OS X version weighs in at only 3MB. It also has a maturity and features the others don't have. One of my favorites is the 'All Links' contextual menu, which gives you a list of all the links on the page. It's particularly useful if you want to see whether a link leads somewhere, or whether it's just a link to advertising.

Lots to Like

iCab Beta 3.0 is faster than 2.x, even though it hasn't yet been optimized for speed. Moreover, its ability to save web archives quickly and efficiently puts Safari, Firefox and IE to shame. Safari and Firefox need to store archived web images in a separate folder, and the archive often doesn't open again correctly, if you move the folder and the page loses track of it.

Conversely, like IE, iCab saves a web archive to a single file, but, unlike IE, it doesn't need to re-download all the images when you save the web archive.

Customization is extensive in the preference panes, and it's nicely integrated with an OS X System Preferences look and feel. For instance, you can set the time lapse for the appearance of contextual menus as low as 1/10th of a second, (although 2/10ths is better if you're not superquick).

Like most other browsers, iCab supports tabbed browsing, snapback, Google searching (with a drop-down menu remembering the last 10 searches), and you can also search AltaVista, Lycos or Yahoo. There's also a script debugger and error report, as well as source display. You can also drop down into a contextual menu and check a web page with BBEdit.

iCab is particularly fast if you turn images off, and it's easy to load all of them (Cmd-Y) or just one if you want to.

The downsides? Few. It crashes harmlessly occasionally, after loading too many big pages - but I've yet to meet a browser that doesn't, on any platform.

So if you haven't tried iCab, or haven't picked it up for a while, give it a go - it's sure to become an obligatory part of your web toolkit.