iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS

http://www.icab.de/

by kaptain • 6 years ago

167 80 6 years ago

rgovostes• 6 years ago

Anyone remember the “Make iCab Smile” campaign? The UI featured a little smiley face in the corner that would change to a frown if there were too many HTML validation errors.

arkanciscan2• 6 years ago

OMG right in the nostalgia!

dhoerl• 6 years ago

I remember!

captn3m0• 6 years ago

Apparently it switched to Webkit a while back.

superdisk• 6 years ago

Why does this keep happening? Browsers sell their soul to just be another coat of paint on top of WebKit. I honestly don't get it. If you're working on a web browser as a personal or open source project, switching to WebKit is basically just replacing the entire project that you've worked on, and then writing your name on WebKit. There's not much more to a browser than a rendering engine. There really isn't a killer feature that Chrome won't just absorb anwyay. So why on earth would you decide to throw away your years of effort, and solely try to differentiate yourself based on slight variations in how your back button looks or your bookmarks work!?

Wowfunhappy5• 6 years ago

Presumably because doing anything else is just impossible in this day and age.

There are only two-and-a-half actively-maintained rendering engines in existence: Gecko, and Chromium/Webkit. There's a reason for that. A single person isn't going to be able to maintain their own.

dclusin• 6 years ago

I think Adblock is a feature that disproves that hypothesis. If google continues to neuter ad blocking as they have with the changes to plugin architecture then it will open itself up to competition.

Things outside the web rendering engine also prevent more widespread adoption of alternative browsers as well. Google's WildVine DRM is an example. That doesn't ship with chromium.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

Chrome doesn’t use WebKit anymore. Perhaps you’re thinking of Blink?

tomxor• 6 years ago

Modern HTML rendering engines are much much harder than you think, switching to webKit is a way to prevent obsolescence for any browser that doesn't have a huge team of devs behind it.

evmar• 6 years ago

Back when Chrome was based on WebKit, my recollection is that WebKit was vaguely half the code. The other half was all the stuff that browsers do that's easy to overlook -- the network stack, process management, 2d graphics engine, cookie management, the URL bar, v8, extensions, etc. And these pieces are the very things that Chrome differentiated and succeeded based on.

(WebKit on Mac includes more of these things, but many of them rely on Mac-specific implementations, which weren't as useful for a browser that is primarily used on Windows.)

1over137• 6 years ago

OTOH, you could look at it like using NSTextView. A basic building block that you add cool stuff atop.

totorovirus• 6 years ago

I think modern browsers could be a baseline for network based OS in couple of years to come. It is really complex and has zillion features that not many developers know exactly know

t0astbread• 6 years ago

As important as politics and implementation diversity are, if I were to take on the monumental task of developing my own browser I would rather focus on improvements that are actually manageable and useful to me as an independent dev or small team. Browsers are more than just webviews with tabs and a lot of potential in the non-core parts is left unexplored by the major players.

And it's not like you're throwing away any effort. A browser isn't automatically worthless "just" because it's built on WebKit the same way an operating system isn't worthless "just" because it's built on Linux.

neurostimulant2• 6 years ago

Is it really possible for a single developer to maintain feature parity with Chrome and Firefox (or even webkit)? If you're a single developer maintaining your own browser, you must choose between maintaining your own incomplete engine that lacks many html5 features the users want, or adopt blink/webkit/gecko and instantly gain feature parity with mainstream browsers.

pcr910303• 6 years ago

I personally use iCab for using the internet on classic Mac OS machines. Very useful, as it’s the most recent browser supporting them.

Other than that, I’m not usre if this is worth the effort on usual machines... I would recommend Safari instead.

LeoPanthera2• 6 years ago

How does iCab compare to Classilla? Which itself is very out of date.

https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

kalleboo• 6 years ago

Classilla handles modern pages better, but iCab has better performance/memory usage

toufiii3• 6 years ago

Can you build things on it? Btw any reliable estimate on their current # of users and their geographic locations?

arkanciscan2• 6 years ago

I used to use this in college before I switched to Camino!

snapetom2• 6 years ago

Oh my God, I loved Camino so much! The browser scene for the Mac in the early Aught's was such a mess. Netscape was bloated, slow as hell, and wasn't keeping up with standards. IE was great, but you were always suspicious of MS's agenda. Safari was still a bit rough and lacked a lot of features.

Camino was snappy, clean, and had very good standards compliance. Such a great little browser!

nathancahill• 6 years ago

Camino was great. Got the whole family on it before eventually migrating them to Firefox around FF4.

Arsenije• 6 years ago

Do you remember Shiira? :)

mhd• 6 years ago

Camino was awesome, one feature that I missed when I had to switch away from it was that its download list actually noticed when the files weren't there anymore (it's the small things that add up).

I even had a short look on how hard it would be to use the shell for a more modern engine, but it seems deeply entrenched in the Mozilla codebase, which is basically a dungeon full of undead, dragons and rust monsters.

ValentineC• 6 years ago

Back in 2005 or so, I used Camino whenever a page insisted on being "IE only" — the browser seemed to have some magical compatibility layer built-in.

I still have it on my Mac, but it's only good for checking how pages look like if they're viewed on a browser that doesn't support the latest web standards.

toyg• 6 years ago

IE was great

IE on Mac had its very own class of display errors and incompatibilities, making webdevs' lives even more miserable than they were before.

birdyrooster• 6 years ago

IE 5 is all you will ever need

Cockbrand2• 6 years ago

I loved iCab on both MacOS 9.x and on early iterations of OS X. Eventually, I started using Opera as my main browser on OS X, which had a lot of features that other browsers adopted a lot later, like tabs. Then Firefox came around, and the rest is history.

deca6cda37d0• 6 years ago

I can't believe it still exists!

toufiii3• 6 years ago

Agreed! Have you ever built anything on it? Like extensions or plugin of some sort

toufiii3• 6 years ago

Good to see iCab is still around. For reals, kudos for perseverance!

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

I recognise it from Mac OS 9 days, and downloaded it to try it again now.

Something I miss from Safari on Mac OS 10.9 was seeing full names in the tab bar. iCab, Chrome, and Firefox all shrink tabs down to their favicon.

Old versions of Safari would show the whole name, and if there wasn't space, it would overflow into a dropdown list on the right.

Yes, you probably can accuse me of opening too many tabs, but I have an amusing anecdote about how I recovered some front-end dev work from tab source when our DigitalOcean server crashed a few weeks ago.

lukevp• 6 years ago

What workflow could you have that your dev work on a DO server would be lost if you didn’t have the html in your browser? Are you direct editing apps on a DO server with no source control?

jasdfijsflj• 6 years ago

Firefox overflows the tabs when there are too many. You can set the minimum width to higher if you want to have it overflow sooner.

bhauer• 6 years ago

I remember Cab for the TT and Falcon. I had not realized it went on to become a Mac browser.

A shame, in a way, that the web is now so complex that alternative browsers are ever more marginalized.

alpb• 6 years ago

Anyone remember the browsers that made you small amounts of money per hour for using them to surf the web?

codegladiator• 6 years ago

Brave?

pzumk• 6 years ago

I use Brave but I have completely disabled the Rewards.

ac29• 6 years ago

AllAdvantage? (probably showing my age here)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

marpstar• 6 years ago

I forgot all about this... blast from the AOL past.

wolco2• 6 years ago

Or offered free internet while showing a banner below.

Or those spin wheel / lotto websites where you would get a limited amount of plays daily but would win real money. Then they send you a real 4 dollar check/cheque.

I wonder what happened to company behind the punch the monkey banner.

Those were the days people thought we would all be working and living through the internet (perhaps in second life style) soon and buying everything. Ironicly 20 years later we are being forced to life this way.

maguay2• 6 years ago

iCab Mobile is also one of the only truly unique iOS browsers. Was the only way to reliably download multiple files for years on iOS, and today still is the closest to having browser add-ons in iOS. Supported uploading files long before Safari too. Its custom zoom levels made many web apps usable on the original non-pro iPad screen sizes as you could fake a higher resolution screen (and you could change your user agent if websites refused to show their desktop version). You can tweak iCab's interface quite a bit too, which makes it a great way to make an internet appliance of sorts to show a single website without having extra toolbars and stuff.

It's not my default browser, but is a great tool to keep around!

fmakunbound• 6 years ago

Aren’t all browsers on iOS using WebKit by Apple decree? I mean the ones you get via AppStore, at least.

emayljames• 6 years ago

That is correct. It means that as a web dev, you can only use IOS for testing webkit.

maguay2• 6 years ago

Yup, still Webkit, still essentially Safari in a wrapper. iCab just built a more powerful wrapper than most.

shp0ngle• 6 years ago

iCab on desktop uses WebKit anyway...

Cockbrand2• 6 years ago

iCab is my main browser on iOS, I love the configurability and the plethora of features. Safari has caught up quite a bit, but iCab is still the best IMHO.

Eugeleo• 6 years ago

Wow, I helped translate this (well, the iOS version) into Czech many many years ago! I’m glad it still exists, the author — Alex, if I remember right — is very friendly and a great developer.

It was my first “freelance” project; I didn’t even expect him to pay, I just liked his browser and wanted to feel like a grown man (was 14 at the time). But he insisted he’ll pay me; it was the first money I ever made. Ah, good memories. If the author sees this: Good luck!

kome• 6 years ago

wholesome story! :)

Kwpolska• 6 years ago

Why are all the screenshots on this page from 2007, and use 10.5 Leopard, if the browser doesn’t even support it anymore?

Oh, because the actual user interface did not change since then. A print button? The entire browser chrome over two times as large as Safari’s or Firefox’s? I don’t see the point in using iCab in 2020, let alone paying $10 for it.

onetom• 6 years ago

This browser seems more customizable to me: https://next.atlas.engineer/

Based on iCab's homepage, it's unclear why would I want to use it really.

iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS

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