Once a compelling alternative to the feuding Netscape and IE browsers, iCab, a Mac-only web browser that largely fell by the wayside, has been reincarnated as a slick WebKit-based browser for OS X.
In the dark days of OS 9, iCab was my browser of choice thanks to its speed and stability, but with OS X embracing Cocoa and the emergence of Firefox and then Safari, iCab largely faded to the background.
But iCab is back and the new version has been entirely re-written as a Cocoa application with Apple's WebKit handling the page rendering details, which means page rendering inconsistencies are gone.
Given that iCab 4.0 will render pages just like Safari, why would you bother? Despite some similarities to the default OS X web browser iCab remains a quite different and considerably more useful browser. Of particular interest to web developers is iCab's ability to extract all links, headlines and external files from a web page.
For instance, the screenshot above shows this page rendered by iCab along with all the links in the page (which opens in a new Window), all the post headlines and all the HTML/CSS errors on the page.
ICab 4.0 also goes far above and beyond Safari when it comes to control. ICab offers a level of control and customization not found in Apple's web browser. For instance, where Safari offers an autofill option for forms, iCab offers the same but includes the ability to create specific form fills for specific webpages.
That sort of fine-grained control is present throughout iCab and offers power users far more features than they'll find in Safari. Another great example is iCab's detailed controls over how to handle JavaScript. Rather than simply the on/off options of most browsers, iCab allows you to turn on JavaScript but disallow certain aspects — such as preventing JavaScript loads from “foreign” servers, a common technique for cross-site scripting hacks.
Other nice tools include a preference pane for enabling and disabling plugins (much like the same feature in Firefox 3), a kiosk mode for fullscreen browsing, the ability to sandbox cookies (limiting them to iCab, rather than WebKit's system-wide storage), and a filter manager which can act as an ad blocker, but can also handle other tasks like downloading linked video files from YouTube.
ICab may have languished for a while as an also-ran browser on OS X, but the new version comes out shooting and boasts a feature set that leaves Safari and others wanting. True, most of iCab 4's feature could be had by adding plugins to Firefox, but if you're looking for Safari's speed and svelte but don't want to give up Firefox's fully loaded feature set, iCab 4.0 just might be the browser you've been looking for.
ICab is free, though some of the features mentioned are part of the “pro” version which costs $25.
[via Daring Fireball]
