Good to see iCab is still around. For reals, kudos for perseverance!
iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#22I can't believe it still exists!
Agreed! Have you ever built anything on it? Like extensions or plugin of some sort
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#23I personally use iCab for using the internet on classic Mac OS machines. Very useful, as it’s the most recent browser supporting them. Other than that, I’m not usre if this is worth the effort on usual machines... I would recommend Safari instead.
Can you build things on it? Btw any reliable estimate on their current # of users and their geographic locations?
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does this keep happening? Browsers sell their soul to just be another coat of paint on top of WebKit. I honestly don't get it. If you're working on a web browser as a personal or open source project, switching to WebKit is basically just replacing the entire project that you've worked on, and then writing your name on WebKit. There's not much more to a browser than a rendering engine. There really isn't a killer…
Presumably because doing anything else is just impossible in this day and age. 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.
Think the chromium one is called "blink"
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#25Apparently it switched to Webkit a while back.
Why does this keep happening? Browsers sell their soul to just be another coat of paint on top of WebKit. I honestly don't get it. If you're working on a web browser as a personal or open source project, switching to WebKit is basically just replacing the entire project that you've worked on, and then writing your name on WebKit. There's not much more to a browser than a rendering engine. There really isn't a killer…
I think modern browsers could be a baseline for network based OS in couple of years to come. It is really complex and has zillion features that not many developers know exactly know
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#26I recognise it from Mac OS 9 days, and downloaded it to try it again now.
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.
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#27I recognise it from Mac OS 9 days, and downloaded it to try it again now. 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…
What workflow could you have that your dev work on a DO server would be lost if you didn’t have the html in your browser? Are you direct editing apps on a DO server with no source control?
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#28I recognise it from Mac OS 9 days, and downloaded it to try it again now. 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…
Firefox overflows the tabs when there are too many. You can set the minimum width to higher if you want to have it overflow sooner.
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does this keep happening? Browsers sell their soul to just be another coat of paint on top of WebKit. I honestly don't get it. If you're working on a web browser as a personal or open source project, switching to WebKit is basically just replacing the entire project that you've worked on, and then writing your name on WebKit. There's not much more to a browser than a rendering engine. There really isn't a killer…
Modern HTML rendering engines are much much harder than you think, switching to webKit is a way to prevent obsolescence for any browser that doesn't have a huge team of devs behind it.
Is this space really evolving that much anymore though? I don't follow this field; what's been going on in web standards lately?
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.
Re: iCab: Alternative Browser for macOS
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern HTML rendering engines are much much harder than you think, switching to webKit is a way to prevent obsolescence for any browser that doesn't have a huge team of devs behind it.
Is this space really evolving that much anymore though? I don't follow this field; what's been going on in web standards lately? 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'…
I can understand why it might seem that way but it is actually evolving very quickly. Probably faster than any other time in history. There are a few things driving this evolution but I think the most important one is a desire to make the web a competitive platform for most types of software. This means lower level APIs, deeper integration with OS, and yes a large focus on performance. 3D graphics, offline support, push notifications, file system access, animation, Bluetooth, and more are all recent areas of focus for browsers.
Web browsers really are becoming similar to operating systems in scope.