OSXFAQ Reader Review 

Working The Web - iCab In Mac OS X.

OSXFAQ Reader Review By Lin Mu

Why is iCab is the first browser I use at work. In a word productivity! I get more done in less time equals more billable hours equals more money! Yes it does a poor job of CSS, and yes that is important. But it is the sum of all it's unique features, that make it so usable. Try doing the following in other browsers. In a typical session I have 7 or 8 windows open, 2 or 3 of which are search engines or reference catalogs, I am briefly skimming the rest for prevalent data, but do not have time to read in full, so I "command-s" to save the "good stuff " as web archive, bang it's done. iCab is the only web browser that does not re-download a page you are already reading! Also iCab gives me complete control over which graphics I want to see and those I don't, I mean complete. I can filter each or all by size, and/or source, and/or type. Again no other browser does this as well! No more pop-up windows. No more ad's.

Or ..... let's say I'm looking at the contents page of some on-line magazine or journal and I know that I am going to read several or all the articles. While I am scrolling down the list, iCab is busy "pre-fetching" these links, so when I do decide, and click, all the links on the contents page have already been downloaded and are instantly there for me to read. Again iCab let's me control what is "pre-fetched" and what is not.

Contextual menus are great tools, but they only work if the task you need is one of the options listed, iCab has over 20 nested commands available, and get this, You control which ones are listed, and which you don't need. This saves time, did I say time equals money. At rendering, on my platform at work icab is faster, (or so close as to not mater), than every other browser out there. But speed is not everything. What you do with all the data you get to look at is what counts. So if you see a link that you need to download later, would it not be nice to have access to a well done, usable, completely configurable download manger? Well iCab has one just a contextual click away. Settings are at your fingertips not buried in some preference pane.

Yes I love OmniWeb for it being a cocoa app. It is very "lickable", but when I have got hours of research to slog through, pretty text alone can not cut it, I gotta get work done! Yes I love the beautiful text scrolling of Opera, but again real world usability is what counts.

But don't take my word for it, try this test. Grab a copy of iCab, take it to work and use the heck out of it exclusively for just two days. If your job requires you to really use the WWW, not just surf on top of it, you will get more real work done. Unless what you want to do at work is listen to iTunes while you wait for that page you just looked at re-download so you can read it later.

The latest version is at:

Enjoy :-)

Lin