iCab

Today iCab is discounted on mupromo (50%).

Here it is the wikipedia article and here the website of the author.

iCab is a browser for the Mac. It is much more: it is a piece of WWW and Mac history. For a long time it has been the only relatively functional browser for MacOS Classic (after Moz dropped support for the platform).

It's a one man affair and once it used to have its custom rendering engine (until version 3). Now it's a nifty commercial browser with some nice features. Of course WebKit is great and means good support, but I kind of regret it does not use its own engine anymore. Diversity is good...

What has iCab that Firefox hasn't? Nothing. It has a great affective value. Of course, if you've got a MacOS 9, 8 or 7.5 system, it is also the only browser (version 3 from MacOS 8.1 and version 2.x from MacOS 7.5).

Still, its a good tool. It has some nice features, for example the smiley which signals when a website (or CSS) is not standard and opens a windows with the errors.

It has got some relics of when browsing was costly and slow: an offline mode and an acoustic signal triggered when it finishes to load a page.

And it's the only tabbed browser for older macs (but this isn't technical, is it?).

It's quite fast, indeed. And it has a very good filter system. Filters are quite general personalization tools: for example they can be used to add a "download" link to YouTube videos or create an AdFilter. iCab has a very good session management, too.

And that's it: it's not rocket science. It's a little old browser. But at $12.5 it's a bargain!