The official iCab thread: Experiences, tweaking, discussion



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Author	The official iCab thread: Experiences, tweaking, discussion (Read 36515 times)
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	on: August 29, 2021, 11:54 Ever since Knezzen and me took over S7T, we've been through some extensive testing of System 7 browsers. From Netscape to Internet Explorer, from Opera to iCab. The latter one stuck with me in version 2.9.9 as the best choice for my Power Mac 8600. While having a relatively small footprint it renders all retro-compatible pages such as S7T fine, is speedy, less crash-prone than IE, none of the annoying Netscape 4 bugs, has a good error reporting, looks pleasing to the eye and offers a lot of settings for tweaking / personalizing. For those who don't know, iCab for the Mac was intially a port of the browser "Cab" for the Atari ST / Falcon line of computers. After that market went down, programmers Alexander Clauss and Oliver Joppich (like many Atarians) switched to the Macintosh. He ported his browser to the Mac, eventually rewriting everything from scratch. Sidenote: iCab is still actively developed today btw, though I don't know how it fares against the giants of the business. Maybe I should check, I am a registered user and used it quite a while during the 1990s into the early 2000s. Back to System 7: The only downside I encountered with v. 2.9.9 I'm using is that it's relatively slow unless you're on either a fast 68040 Mac (68k version) or a 150+ Mhz PowerPC Mac. The one thing I haven't tested yet is how older iCab versions behave speed-wise on lower end hardware. My hope with this thread is to sharing experiences and tweaking tips.
Last Edit: October 15, 2021, 16:41 by Bolkonskij
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #1 on: August 29, 2021, 12:07 The first and most obvious tips are also the ones you find on the System 7 Today website - disable JavaScript and CSS via the preferences. CSS is an incomplete CSS1 implementation, so not much use here anyway. And JavaScript is at ECMAscript 3, so not really useful anyhow. Another thing I did was increasing the available cache images via preferences -> Cache by a few more MB. It's set on 2MB only by default. Unless you're still using a 30 year old hard disk that is about to fall apart, this should speed up things when you're a regular on some pages (like System 7 Today . I feel it speeded up page rendering a bit. What I'm currently playing with is the filters. The filter functionality (access via tools -> filter manager) allows you essentially to setup filters for each individual website. So let's say there's a page you want to visit but you hate to wait until it loads that big 800x600 image? Set up a filter to block out any image above a certain size to avoid it slowing your 68k Mac down. I need to experiment some more with it though. What about you guys?
Last Edit: October 15, 2021, 16:42 by Bolkonskij
Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #2 on: August 29, 2021, 16:29 Opera is my preferred browser on 7.6.1, but I'll gladly give iCab a go again. Mostly because of the roots in another awesome computer platform

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #3 on: August 29, 2021, 16:32 You're mixing up something here. Originally, it wasn't made for the Amiga aka awesome computer. It was for the Atari ST ... ;-) Give it a try again, really. It's my favorite :-)
Last Edit: October 15, 2021, 16:43 by Bolkonskij
ovalking 128 MB Posts: 199	Reply #4 on: August 30, 2021, 22:38 There has never been a great Mac web browser IMO. But for balance of interface, capability, stability & speed, Netscape 4.8 is probably my favourite. I have tried iCab but it is too unstable with system errors and unexpected quits. e.g. http://3318news.c o.uk/ will crash it, but not Netscape or IE. Other annoyances are keyboard shortcuts that don't work and lack of feedback from uncontactable sites. Opera is a non-starter - far too slow and clumsy for me. The big strength of iCab is speed - rendering complex pages much quicker than others. A while back I timed how long it took to open the browser and my 'html test page' (from the Finder) on a variety of Macs. I include some results for interest.... The contenders were Netscape 4.8, IE 5.1.7, iCab 2.9.9, Opera 5.0 All system 7.5.5 or 7.6.1 Times in seconds. 7100/80 iCab 61, IE 68, Nets 70, Opera 130 7500/200 iCab 32, Nets 47, IE 54, Opera 76 8500/G3 iCab 17, IE 27, Nets 35, Opera 48 ˇˇ
Last Edit: August 31, 2021, 22:31 by ovalking
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #5 on: August 31, 2021, 17:30 Interesting post, ovalking! I can reproduce iCab crashing on that page on my 8600. The issue is solved by deactivating JavaScript and CSS in iCab's settings. It will just behave like a faster Netscape 4 after that. That is, it'll simply render modern pages element after element. Here's a screenshot I took with JS/CSS deactivated: http://revontulet.org/2021/08/31/cycling-news.png Another alternative with iCab is opening this page through Frogfind to read the news, like here: http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=http://3318news.co.uk/ One advantage (as you noticed) is that iCab carries much less baggage with it compared to IE and NS. I have yet to try earlier iCab versions. They should be even faster since the latest version added stuff like a rudimentary CSS1 implementation. Less weight should make it faster. I have to locate a few older versions and do a test run. Join in, if you like? :-) And I totally second your experience with Opera 5. It's very slow and extremely crashy on my 8600/200 and doesn't render pages any better than iCab. I know Knezzen runs it on his upgraded Power Mac 5500 (Sonnet Card G3), maybe he can give us some more insight into the advantages / disadvantages on very fast System 7 machines.
Last Edit: March 19, 2024, 11:20 by Bolkonskij
ovalking 128 MB Posts: 199	Reply #6 on: August 31, 2021, 22:42 Thanks for your tips Bolkonskij. Javascript was the key with that site. CSS was already off (I hate CSS... content should be king). I shall give iCab further attention. I may have underestimated the usefulness of Frogfind too...

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #7 on: October 12, 2021, 13:42 If someone wants to join in testing older versions of iCab, I've located and uploaded them here for the time being: http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab%201.1%20PPC%20(Eng).sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre1.2_English_PPC.sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre1.3a_English_PPC.sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre1.7_English_PPC.sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre1.8_English_PPC.sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre1.9a_English_PPC.sit http://www.system7today.com/data/uploads/downloads/iCab_Pre2.0_English_PPC.sit Feel free to do some testing. Maybe we can locate a better version than 2.9.x

ovalking 128 MB Posts: 199	Reply #8 on: October 12, 2021, 17:13 v2.9.9 has one big advantage... 'The expiry date is disabled in iCab 2.9.9 so this version can be used without a license forever'. Earlier versions expire without a licence.f

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #9 on: October 15, 2021, 16:27 That's true. It even seems old versions are time-bombed, so even for registered iCab users (like me) there's no way to try them out unless I set my system clock permanently back to something like 1998. Bummer.
Last Edit: October 15, 2021, 16:44 by Bolkonskij
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #10 on: October 17, 2021, 10:21 I've sent an e-mail to Alexander Clauss, the coding hero behind iCab and pointed out this thread asking for how to circumvent the time-bomb on older iCab versions. And also suggested a 25th anniversary version for Mac OS ;-) Would be cool to have a 2.9.9 stripped off the features we don't need anymore today (CSS1, JavaScript) and optimized for raw speed. Let's see if he answers. (Please say "Hi" if you read this, Alexander Clauss!)

Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #11 on: October 17, 2021, 10:34 Hopefully he thinks it's a good idea

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #12 on: November 03, 2021, 17:00 Unfortunately, I didn't get a reply from him. Too bad. Maybe I should re-send my e-mail, given he's probably quite busy and some nerd asking about 20 year old browser versions isn't going to be top priority I'd figure ;-) Anyway, all the old versions of iCab were time-bombed, that is, they wouldn't work if your system clock was set after a certain date. Good news is that versions 1.1 and 1.2 have been hacked to work properly - to be grabbed from the Mac Garden. My 8600's PSU is on the way back to me. I hope to do some testing with those versions on 7.6.1 this weekend to figure out how much less weight they carry and if they might pose a good alternative System 7 browser.

Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #13 on: November 01, 2022, 10:26 I started adding some sites for my liking to the iCab quick search menu. I'll list those I have right now with the URL's you need to do a quick search directly from iCab Open iCab prferences, chose "Internet Sites" in the "Searches" category in the left column. Click the "New" button and fill in the "key", title and URL of the seach pages you want to add. I typically add the first letter of the name of the site as key. m for Macintosh Garden, f for FrogFind etc. My list of sites: Macintosh Garden: http://macintoshgarden.org/search/node/ Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/ FrogFind: http://frogfind.com/?q= Wiby: http://wiby.org/?q=

cballero 1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever	Reply #14 on: November 01, 2022, 11:54 Very clever use of assigning keys to URLs in iCab! You made me wonder, what other Mac software is crippled by time-bombs like previous iCab versions?

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