iCab Editor's Review

iCab is an alternative Web Browser for Mac OS X.

It has features that you won't usually find in other browsers. The most interesting feature is the 'Kiosk Mode'. Opera has it too but this is a little bit more interesting. In this mode, the application disables the Dock and the Finder menu, as well as the possibility to select the text from a web page. It also disables all the contextual menus. The application runs in full screen mode with no access to the system settings.

The rendering engine of this browser is very good. This browser is known as one that has past the Acid2 rendering test. I wanted to see that with my own eyes and the browser did great. I repeated the test several times and sometimes it didn't render the page from the first try. In that case, it worked when I clicked again the test URL.

The stability isn't one of the greatest. I stressed the browser pretty badly and it crashed several times. It crashed twice while doing the Acid2 test. This is bad especially when running under the Kiosk Mode, because this gives full access to the operating system.

The rendering speed is another thing that disappointed me. The browser works very slow compared to Opera or Firefox. This happens even with cached Web pages. The other browsers recommended above have a better cache management.

The tabbed browsing is well implemented, but it's annoying because it won't force by default the opening of a new page in a new tab rather than opening that page in a new window. I had to search a little bit for that option, but fortunately it is implemented. Another thing that misses is the session saver functionality.

Pluses: it has a quite good rendering engine, tabbed browsing functionality and a pretty good Kiosk Mode.

Drawbacks / flaws: the application can crash pretty easily, the rendering engine is slow.

In conclusion: the application can be unlocked to the Pro version but I don't think it will become more stable because it has the same build.

version reviewed: 3.0.3