iCab is a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

for

MacOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and

Classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

by Alexander Clauss, derived from Crystal

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French holding company Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) and its focus is on "video games, consumer hardware, licensing and bl ...

Browser (CAB) for Atari TOS compatible computers. It was one of the few browsers still updated for the classic Mac OS prior to that version being discontinued after version 3.0.5 in 2008; Classilla was the last browser that was maintained for that OS but it was discontinued in 2021. The downloadable product is fully functional, but is nagware—periodically displaying a

dialog box In computing, a dialog box (also simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes are classified as " modal" or "modeless", dep ...

asking the user to register the product, and upgrade to the "Pro" version.

Versions

iCab 2.9.9 supports both 68k and

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

Macintosh systems running System 7.5 through Mac OS 9.2.2. While no longer maintained, iCab 2.9.9 is still available for download and registration. iCab 2.9.8 runs natively on early versions of Mac OS X, but Mac OS X compatible versions of iCab 2.x are no longer officially available for download. iCab 3.x can run on PowerPC systems running Mac OS 8.5 through Mac OS 9.2.2, or PowerPC or

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

systems running Mac OS X 10.1 or later. iCab 3 was last updated in January 2008. iCab 4 was rewritten to use the Cocoa API and the WebKit rendering engine. It can run on PowerPC or Intel systems running Mac OS 10.3.9 or later. iCab 5 was released on June 12, 2012. It runs on Mac OS 10.5 or later. iCab 6 was rewritten using the new technologies in macOS Big Sur and released on October 31, 2020. It runs on macOS 10.13 or later.

History

iCab was introduced in 1999. The first versions of iCab were criticized for not supporting CSS and DOM, but were given praise for making it easier to navigate to links listed on pages. iCab 3 introduced improved rendering capabilities, including support for CSS2 and

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

(via the ATSUI toolkit). iCab 4 switched to WebKit for its rendering engine, giving it the same rendering abilities as Apple's

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

browser. On 7 June 2009, iCab 4.6, using the WebKit rendering engine, became the first desktop browser released to display a score of 100/100 and pass the Acid3 test. Apple's Safari 4 browser was released one day later and has been officially credited as being the first official release browser to pass the Acid3 test with a score of 100/100.

Features

iCab features a filter manager which allows users to avoid downloading advertisements and other content. Currently iCab comes with two filters (advertisements and video). Other kinds of filters add features, such as the

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

video filter which adds a download link on all

page views. iCab has features for

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

developers, including an

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

validity checker, an automatic page refresh option, a Web Inspector, DOM Inspector,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

debugger, and a Console. iCab's "Automatic Update" option, for any page it is rendering directly from the local hard disk, will automatically reload the page when changes are saved to disk. The HTML syntax validity checker displays a smiley face in the Status Bar and also, optionally, in the Toolbar. Clicking on the smiley will bring up a list of any errors on the page, as will "Error Report" from the Tools menu. Double clicking on an error will display the page source, with the offending syntax highlighted. The HTML syntax validator was first seen in the same author's earlier web browser, CAB. iCab's Download manager allows the user to start, stop, resume and review downloads. It maintains a download history, and supports downloading of an individual page, or a whole site (crawling) with many user-selectable crawl-constraint options. It can save as portable web archives (a ZIP archive containing HTML, images and other files), or as individual files on the local hard drive. iCab also contains the following features: * Tabbed browsing. * Javascript and CSS2 support. * Multiple language support, including Arabic on older Macs (cannot display UTF-16 pages). * Filtering: ** Filtering out of images and plugin content (e.g. ads). ** Adjust rendering, network, JavaScript, and cookies settings for individual sites or types of pages. * Kiosk mode: full-screen display and access controls. * Acid2 test compliance. * Configurable print dialog. * History window which can sort by title, last access date, or URL. * Hotlist (bookmark) mechanism which can automatically or manually check for updates to bookmarked sites. * Reload a single image on a page without needing to reload the whole page. * Disable web "annoyances" such as animated

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

s and embedded sound files. * User agent spoofing (i.e. pretending to be another browser). * Support for sessions (i.e. saving and then loading all open windows and tabs). * Add any query (e.g., search engine,

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

) to the toolbar search widget by point-and-click.

iCab Mobile

iCab Mobile is the mobile version of the iCab Web Browser for iOS and iPadOS. It is one of the oldest third-party web browsers for iOS, being released in 2009. The app is available on the app store for $1.99. iCab Mobile includes custom gestures, quick links for sharing, a drop down window that provides previews of tabs, a customizable user interface,

Apple Watch The Apple Watch is a brand of smartwatch products developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple. It incorporates activity tracker, fitness tracking, Health (Apple), health-oriented capabilities, and wireless telecommunication, and integrates wit ...

integration, quick form filling, customizable filters for CSS pages, URLs, and cookies. It also has a file downloader and manager and integration with the Files app. Some reviewers have criticized it for its cluttered user interface.

References

External links