iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
icab.de
icab.de
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!
It's not my default browser, but is a great tool to keep around!
Other than that, I’m not usre if this is worth the effort on usual machines... I would recommend Safari instead.
Camino was snappy, clean, and had very good standards compliance. Such a great little browser!
I actually paid for it. Sad that there's not much to choose from nowadays.
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.
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.
IE on Mac had its very own class of display errors and incompatibilities, making webdevs' lives even more miserable than they were before.
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.
A shame, in a way, that the web is now so complex that alternative browsers are ever more marginalized.
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.
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.
The monopoly should definitely be fought.
Unfortunately, I think the best way to fight the monopoly at this point is to use Firefox. As bad as 2½ browsers is, I'd much rather have 2½ than 1½.
(On desktop, webkit is also fine, they need marketshare there. Anything that isn't Chromium.)
It also gives Google the power to unilaterally add or remove anything from the standard as they think will benefit Google. Sure, Microsoft or Brave could choose not to go along with the change, but Microsoft doesn't want to spend resources maintaining a fork, so they're much more likely go go along with whatever Google does.
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.
Seems like lately, from a user perspective, the current emphasis is mostly on doing the same things faster. So an indie browser developer probably won't get JS JIT down as well as a megacorp, but is that it? It seems to me like if you are standards compliant as of 5 years ago there shouldn't be a lot to do today.
Web browsers really are becoming similar to operating systems in scope.
If somebody does depend on something obscure like javascript APIs for bluetooth [like someone in this thread cited], are they doing that as a desktop app with chromium embedded or are they a more traditional webpage? Does it completely fall over and explode if you don't have bluetooth support in the browser? That would be pretty unreasonable for most developers.
What I'm saying is there is a difference between the bleeding edge stuff or things that push boundaries and common practice. And if you are coding against that other stuff, you also need a fallback for if it doesn't work.
Web push notifications are usually not an essential part of web app experiences and I agree they have done more harm than good so far. Some of these features enable types of apps that were just not possible on the web before. Things like 3D games where WebGL/WebGPU would be essential, text editors where they don't function without access to the file system, or a browser based video chat app that uses WebRTC.
As these features become available in most browsers their adoption will increase and any browser that doesn't support them will not be able to access web apps or pages that depend on them.
You basically need to handle an operating system where the VM is built on top of your browser, with all the security responsibilities and changing demands of developers working on your platform therein.
(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.)
A modern browser as a basis for the Shell/userland of an operating system is essentially Chrome OS with a difference in user experience that’s about as different as the set of features from browser to browser. A lean userland might be desirable, but even operating systems with lean out of the box userlands usually have a package manger that can quickly expand the base of software available to you on the system.
And speaking of package managers, the stuff going on with Nix and Guix is a lot more interesting than reinventions of Chrome OS. Check them out, the system can be about as lean or thick as you like depending on how you configure it.
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.
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.
Based on iCab's homepage, it's unclear why would I want to use it really.