“On New Year’s Eve iCab released version 4.0 if its Web browser. I’m not going to say ‘long-awaited,’ because most iCab fans had pretty much given up hope that there would ever be a 4.0 release. However, it’s here, and iCab is back with a vengeance,”Charles W. Moore reports for PB Central.
“iCab was the program that replaced Netscape 4.5 as my default browser sometime around 1998, and it may end up becoming my workhorse browser again in 2008. It version 4 release appears to be that good, at least in the early going,” Moore reports.
“iCab is a Mac port of the pre-existing and successful Atari ST Web browser, ‘Cab,’ developed by German programmer Alexander Clauss. Cab was written in Pascal, but the Mac port of iCab was coded entirely in CodeWarrior C. It has been essentially a labor of love for Clauss and co-developer Oliver Joppisch,” Moore reports.
Rendering speed in iCab 4.0 is “a major improvement over iCab 3,” Moore reports. “While iCab has pledged from the outset that a free version would always be available, it remains one of the last two browsers (OmniWeb is the other) that requires a software fee for full support. A single user license of ‘iCab Pro’ costs $25 / 25 EUR. Entering this code in iCab will switch off the ‘shareware reminder’ box. At the moment, the only restriction of the free version is that annoying little ‘shareware reminder’ box popping up from time to time.”
Read Moore’s full review here.
More info and download link for iCab 4.0 here.
Here is what is on the iCab site…
iCab 4.0.0 (January 2008)
iCab 4.0 is completely rewritten and is now based on Cocoa instead of Carbon. It is much faster than iCab 3 has a polished user interface and also some new features. iCab 4 is available as Universal Binary for all PowerPC and Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer. All users of iCab 3 should update to iCab 4 if their system matches the system requirements.
System Requirements for iCab 4.0
Mac with G3, G4, G5 or Intel processor
Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer. Mac OS X 10.4.x or 10.5.x is recommended (a few details won’t work under 10.3.9)
iCab 3.0.5 (January 2008)
There’s also a new version of iCab 3 (Carbon based) available which can be used for older Macs and MacOS releases, where iCab 4 can not be used.
System Requirements for iCab 3.0.3
Universal Binary: Mac with G4, G5 or Intel processor and Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer.
Mac OS X version for PowerPC: Mac with G3, G4 or G5 processor and Mac OS X 10.1.5 or newer
Classic Version: Any Mac with Mac OS 8.5 up to Mac OS 9.2.2
Not worth 25 bucks to me, Safari works fine and its free. I’ve used iCab 4 about a day, nice browser, but there are several nice browsers that don’t cost $25 and they work great on my new iMac. I’ll stick with Safari and Firefox.
firefox pwnz.
Look at that guy’s dock in the screenshot! Holy Jesus! Hasn’t anyone told him he could just drag his applications folder to the Dock and it’ll become a stack that shows all of his applications when clicked? Try it, Clauss…your screenshots will look better. In Leopard one icon can replace fifty.
Great idea, Jooop. Then the user can click twice to do exactly what he can now in one click.
Stacks, as currently implemented, are, to quote MDN, “pointless… ugly and virtually useless.”
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/15685/
And, that’s MDN’s screenshot, not the iCab guy’s.
Last time I used iCab it was crapola – slow as, and this was before we had any decent speed browsers like Safari 3. There appears to be some design influences from flock in this version. But the day I pay for a web browser is the day Safari dies… So it’s a no go for me.
Ping-Firefox beta 3 has an Apple theme that is quite nice. I am using it now on all my machines.
Long live free open source software!
nekogami13, the last time you said it I corrected you. You are still wrong. Safari has three choices for accepting cookies: all, none, and “only from the site you navigate to”. This may not be “perfect”, nor “optimal”, but it is decidedly better than your presentation.
Stay with Firefox, it’s within your mind-set.
It’s been a while since I counted, but my last count showed over 14 browsers available for the Mac. Like others, I had figured iCab had been put to rest. Like others, I am impressed with the new version. I will have to use it for a while more to determine where it fits in my browser hierarchy, but it is looking good early on. I have liked (and paid for) OmniWeb. But I think that it, too, is in need of updating. Overall, Safari still gets most use at the moment. I am happy about iCab’s new version though.
It strikes me that the pay-for browsers should be rolling out updates and sweet features all the time, or the cost seems wasted. When there are such great browsers out there for free, why pay for one that doesn’t offer anything really significantly better than the free ones?
Well, if some guy writing anonymously as “MDN” says so, then that’s the last word on the matter. It doesn’t make any difference that I and every other mac user I know loves having their applications folder as a stack on the dock instead of individual icons for every single application. MDN doesn’t like it, so Apple should just remove the feature.
Jooop: It doesn’t make any difference that I and every other mac user I know loves having their applications folder as a stack on the dock instead of individual icons for every single application.
I and many other users refer hierarchically grouped applications. And that is unfortunately impossible with stacks. Stacks are a toy – barely usable as long as you only have very few items and will always stay limited to those.
For anybody doing real work, hierarchical lists are simply a necessity. Without HierarchicalDock Leopard would just be unusable for me. And I hope 10.5.2 will finally restore this essential capability of all previous versions.
One other point is that neither stacked nor hierarchically grouped applications can be used as drag targets. Which is a good reason to keep certain applications in the Dock.