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Re "Make it part of core functionality."
http://icab.de/info.html offers that on OS X.

I liked iCab. As a Web developer. It had some good page analysis tools. I even paid for it, way back when.

This is a bit dated, but fun.

What would be interesting is Adblock Plus for the iPhone.

Heh! Odds of that being approved for the App Store are approximately 3,720 to 1.

http://www.icab.de/mobile.html

http://www.appbird.com/adblockweb/

though it does give iPhone a tabbed browser now

Wait - surely the Iphone has a tabbed browser, right?

http://www.icab.de/mobile.html

Have you heard of iCab? It's the only Acid2-compliant browser that runs on Mac OS 9, and is much more standards compliant than Gecko 1.3 (the version used in Classilla).

Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern browser with tabbed browsing, built-in AdBlock, excellent standards compliance (iCab was the first browser with an Acid2-compliant public build) - the only thing it's really missing is CSS3 opacity, and all that good stuff.

I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.

The latestOpera still works fine on 10.3. It doesn't "look" very Mac-like but I'd call it effective.

You can also try iCab which has interesting features of its own. It uses the system WebKit engine, though, which in 10.3 is outdated.

I'm sure absolutely nobody mentioned iCab here until now. The ones that invented ad-filtering 10 years ago (I said years). And, as I am to it, what about Amaya? THE W3C editor/browser, open-source, multiplatform, wysiwyg in the editor part? http://www.icab.de/ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

iCab 3.x used its own rendering engine back in the day. I guess 4.x has been rewritten to use Webkit.

Back in the day it was a great browser when your only alternatives under OS 9 (and 8) were Netscape or IE.

This is kind of a concern, Mac OS X 10.3 is still alive and well out there.
[...]
And FF has been he only alternative for an up to date browser.

Actually, iCab and Opera are still supporting 10.3.9.

iCab is a browser with just such a buggy-page indicator. It's had this feature for years. A smiley green face, or a grumpy red one!

I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad.

Just out of curiosity, are you an iCab user?

I did try Windows 3.1 on a 386 once, and I think it didn't want to have a "page file", known to us Linux folks as a swap file. It did connect to the internet, but mostly only to text sites, such as government weather sites. I was using dial up which can have problems contributing to the text-only surfing on tiny processors.
On another one, I put Basic Linux on a small Compaq Contura notebook, and set up a dial-up web server, (for test only), one could edit the served page (text only), and view it in Netscape 3.0. Slow, but it was reliable and worked. Had two hard drives for the Contura, one with Windows, so I removed it, and put the test drive in, to install Basic Linux.
I did get some very old Mac's to connect to the internet, same thing, mostly text-only pages available.
The trick here is to set up the hard drive on a more powerful computer, then move it to the old box.
I have a newer Mac Quadra 660AV, and one can easily download the iCab browser, it automatically installs, and does not have a time limit for the 68K Macs. Makes a mess of most modern web pages, however.

Yes, we can all waste time on projects like this, but they do tend to increase our overall range of knowledge about the subject of "installing OS's on PC's".

For those of you wanting to try a "loadlin" install of Knoppix 3.4, or my remaster of it (screenshots below), I have a tarball of the files to set up a MSDOS menu, all of the loadlin batch files, and the 2.4 kernel to use, here.

For this setup, I put MSDOS 6.21 on a small hard drive at /dev/hda, and then use a larger hard drive for linux, having copied the livecd using the "tohd=/dev/hdd1" Knoppix cheatcode. On this box my "hdd" is 40 GB, on another, I have a 160 GB drive, both with many partitions. I always use a 2 GB or so partition for a "persistent home", that makes the system automatically save all kinds of files and applications for you, to return on the next boot-up of the livecd system. Your Mozilla Thunderbird mail settings return, as well as your printer configuration.
You'll notice the "home=scan" knoppix cheatcode in most of the loadlin command lines in the tarball.
One big advantage to using a "persistent home" is the ability to download and test (and keep) the nightly builds of Firefox, or Opera (weekly builds). You can easily set up a separate IceWM (my default wm) menu item for the test build, and keep that too. Lots of options here for experimenters.

If you don't have MSDOS, Windows 95 or 98 will work, the machine just displays the Windows splash screen briefly before going to the Menu, where you can then multi-boot. I threw in MSDOS "Edit" and "Scandisk" in the Menu, to give me a way (With Edit) to fix the loadlin batch files if they have any problems.

I do this on all of my computers, none have more than 256 MB of RAM, this box I am on now has two 200 MHZ Pentium Pro's. The setup runs as fast as one could possibly want, I use a Diamond Stealth S60 Radeon 7000 ATI 32 B card, and use the DVI output to a 17 inch Dell Ultrasharp LCD monitor.

These "loadlin" installs are faster, quieter (won't beat your hard drive up) than XP, and run on much older computers, usually from the Windows 98 era. QTParted is available in the CD, so you can set up the /dev/hda with the swap file, and other partitions.

Rapidweather

Glad to hear that the current 2.x stuff is not affected. I'm using FF 2.0.0.1 now, in my knoppix remaster (see screenshots below), and have other things I need to be doing with the remaster than upgrading FF. I do, however, jump on it and upgrade the browsers whenever they have new versions out. With Firefox, I put 9 RSS feeds on the toolbar by default, and for it's home page, I use a local version of this one, but with a slide-out ~/ menu setup, for browsing the /ramdisk.
I notice that Netscape 9 for linux may be released in a couple of months. I'll try it out. Since I usually run my knoppix remaster with a 1 or 2 GB "persistent home" partition, I can easily download it and have it up and running in a few minutes, and can keep it around for a while to see how it does compared to Flock, Firefox and Opera. If it has anything to offer, and is not loaded up with AOL stuff, I might put it in the CD. I still use Netscape 4 on a Macintosh Quadra 660AV, and it seems to do a better job with the web pages than icab 2.99.
That version is free, with no time limit, since it is for older Mac systems. Downloads quickly and installs automatically, however. Just a little disappointed in how many of the web pages look, so I tend to stick with Netscape.

Rapidweather

iCab weill run on the older osx stuff. I always found it better than either navigator or explorer when I was still running classic. I just checked on their page, he still even has a build for 68k macs.

http://www.icab.de/dl.php

moz gets the press, but there are always alternatives

Poor, poor Microsoft not being able to get a browser that meets 1998's standards by 2007. As the article pointed out, it takes years to get it right. Of course, if they hadn't let MSIE rot to begin with, they'd be okay now.

As it stands, it's already been demonstrated that:

• Large, well-organized open source projects (Mozilla) can do it.
• Well-organized corporate / open source collaborations can do it (Safari)
• Smallish companies can do it (Opera)
• and even guys-in-their-basements can do it (iCab)

Microsoft, one of the largest software companies in the world, is trying to claim they don't have at least equal development muscle to these groups?

Seriously, the problem is of their own making. Now they're trying to fix the biggest bugs in IE6, but they're ignoring some of the biggest features of CSS that it lacks (like display: table*). It's hard to feel any sympathy.

Smiley? You're thinking of iCab.

iCab was the first browser to pass the ACID2 test, even if it doesn't manage to render a lot of pages correctly :) http://www.icab.de/

But there is no (recent/decent) Opera version for OS9. For classic I'd recommend iCab 3 beta - it's pretty usable and passes Acid2 test.

Try iCab 3.0 beta.

They only deign to let recent versions of IE or Netscape use their site.

The fact that once I told iCab, the Mac only browser to spoof its identity, the site worked perfectly for me.

So the pricks at Propper lost a sale due to their stupid website developers who can't code for anything other than IE or Netscape.

Fuck 'em!

It is indeed.

iCab, on the other hand, feature it's own rendering engine

Actually, iCab 3 passes the test too, and i believe it was the first. Just as it's a mac-only browser, it doesn't get as much attention or use as it deserves (although its javascript support is atrocious)

http://www.icab.de/

iCab3 beta for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9(!) passes Acid2 test and is freely available for download.

Web browsing not up to date?

If you are a Mac user you should go visit iCab's web site:

http://www.icab.de/

They have had one of the best web browsers for the Macintosh platform for years though their version 2.X browsers could not render CSS based web sites properly.

Their new version 3 beta which came out about two months ago is fully up to date with web technologies.

And iCab (almost) does not crash, though if it does fold up, you can immediately relaunch it, even in Classic Mac OS as a disc check immediatly afterword has never found any disk damage from the iCab application.

Also very *very* nice is the ability to archive a web site into a single file on your disk, (which Apple has just adapted in Safari in Tiger).

The cost is $29 US and can be used for free in a non-commercial environment.

If you are running version 7 of Mac OS, you can still get their older 2.x browser which still runs like a champ.

Just to follow up on this, the public beta release of iCab 3.0 is now available, for both Mac OS 8.5-9.2.2 and Mac OS X:

http://www.icab.de/dl.php

I use iCab on Mac OS 9. It isn't as powerful as Firefox or Opera but it is the best thing I have found for this legacy OS.

Although iCab can't support CSS well, at least tries to comply with HTML standards.

The closes I can get to Firefox is the Mozilla 1.3.1 (WaMCom) browser. But that browser is very buggy and slow on my Mac. The Opera 6.03 is too buggy to use too.

ICAB of course.

doesn't everyone remember icab?

A good UI would allow either to be typed into the address bar, check if they are a valid URL, and if not treat them as a search term. This isn't exactly hard to do, but seems not to have been done by any browser I've yet used.

Internet Explorer does this (check "Search from the Address bar"), but it does it terribly and I always end up turning it off as soon as I notice that it's on. Usually it ends up searching for my mis-typed URLs, which it will find no hits for. Of course, first it has to try to load the "address", wait for the NS lookup to fail, contact its search engine, and then render the results complete w/ advertising and chartjunk. Obviously it has to use some shitty search engine, too (i.e., not google).

iCab, as I recall, has a much better implementation. You can do "g <search terms>" in the address bar to search google, etc. This works well because presumably even if you can't remember to use the right UI control when you want to search, you definitely know whether or not you want to go to a specific URL or search for something.

The last Macs that can't run OS X reasonably well are now 7 years old (beige G3).
And if you really need OS 9, you can use iCab instead of MSIE.

Obligatory and traditional post stating that the Mac is OS is superior because it lacks such "features" as Messenger, is unaffected by Windows viri and that iCab , the Mac only browser has a popup blocker built into it.

Also included in the traditional post is a gratuitous slam against Windows users: "Windows users are poopieheads for using Windows!"

Finishing up with a "In Soviet Russia..." joke

In Soviet Russia, you annoy popups!

It has been my pleasure to provide the Slashdot Community with the obligatory and traditional posting making fun of the Windows OS and WIndows Users, contrasting the Windows OS with the Mac OS,in a snarky, superior and uninformative manner, in a comment thread about yet another flaw/fault/sploit in the Windows OS.

Thank you for your gracious attention!

"They might consider getting their very own GeekMan to make sure that their site renders properly in Gecko and Opera. :/"

And iCab , too!

But iCab sure can!

All I got was the goatse guy and a scat image.

No popups! Not a one.

Ah, iCab on Mac OS. No BS web browsing.

Actually, iCab is a relatively-modern (HTML 4) browser that will run on 68k Macs. I run it under Basilisk II all the time.

icab is crap, and no one uses it anymore.

iCab is impressive in the fact that it's essentially the work of one man. Two if you count the InScript (iCab's ECMAScript engine) developer. Until Opera got into the Mac scene, it was the number three GUI browser for the Mac, and it had implemented the link tag, which spurred Opera and then Mozilla to do so. With that in place, intelligent pre-fetching became possible, and Herr Clauss implemented that too. For these reasons alone iCab is important. Add that it's the only actively developed browser for Classic MacOS that I know of, and definitely the only actively developed browser for 68k Macs, and it is definitely worth mentioning. These niches may be small, but if you're in that niche, iCab is the most important browser out there. My mother-in-law has a 6100, and iCab is the only modern browser (broken ol' Netscape 4 is not really an option) she can run with acceptable speed.

An astounding number of people assume that what they see is what I get. This leads to (for instance) poor web design. People assume that everyone browses the web with IE or Netscape, so they base their information on images, assume the screen is several hundred pixels wide, make assumptions like
if (browser != IE && browser != Netscape) // can't use JavaScript
and don't even think to check how a blind person would experience the page, whether it'll look like crap on a PDA browser, or whether anything will break with an off-the-wall browser like iCab.

This isn't a poor assumption just at the web level. It's easy to fall into the trap of designing a product so that you can use it without thinking "How might users differ from me?"

Nor is the problem limited to computers. A famous example (though I'm not sure how true it is) was trying to market cars in Japan with a steering wheel on the left side. A harder example to get right is asking undereducated girls whether they have "vaginal secretions" instead of the clearer "cunt juice."

The lesson is: there's no perfect substitute for real users.

"Word. The dumbest features ever thunk up by man are all tied to Javascript...the images that swirl around your cursor, preventing you from clicking on links. The script which loads everything at the same time, which means you wait forever for the one broken image. Cascading menus that don't disappear. Or do disappear, just as you are about to click on them.

And worst of all, blocking the right mouse button (or as I like to call it, "the button i use to navigate the fucking internet") in the name of "copyright protection." Every time I see this monstrosity, I download all of the images from the site, stick them in a zip file, and email it to the webmaster. "Your copyright protection didn't work. Neither did the mouse button I use to open links in a new window. One of these things can be easily fixed." "

What the heck are you going on about?

I've NEVER seen any of the things you mention.

Oh, wait...

That's right.

I use a Macintosh, and iCab is my browser of choice.

Never mind.

While you're waiting for Apple to patch this why not check out Mozilla Firebird 0.7 for OS X.

It is a great, feature rich browser. Of course you could also check out Mozilla 1.5, Camino, Netscape, iCab, Omni Web, Opera, or even IE 5 or MSN for the Mac

All of these can be downloaded from their respective sites, or from the Internet Utilities section of Apple's Mac OS X Downloads page.

Dude, iCab is way ahead of Netscape 2, and still actively developed for 68k hardware.

In this Macintosh-only household the browser of choice is iCab!

The ONLY time I use IE is for the few times I have to access my bank's website and mess with my accounts online. As my bank is stupid beyond words, their website is IE only.

For everything else, I use iCab.

Point iCab to it and let it download all of them to avoid having to click on each one...

Yes, Netscape. And you left out the links for iCab and Opera (not that they re that hard to find...).

I cooked up a browser detector that separates the old browsers, like Netscape 3.04 from the newer ones, so I could get them on an identical page that I built and tested to work correctly on the old browsers. I do not get a lot of hits on that, so I either don't have a lot of old browsers out there, or just have an unpopular page. Here it is to try, if you are running something with the Javascript turned off, and really old, on an old OS, like Windows 3.1:
Go here, and then click on the Star Home pageAs you can see, I have a selection of "Your Home Page" pages, to try and solve the problem of having so many different browsers out there, from MSIE 6 to Nettamer. I had to fix a page for the Mac OS 7.5.3 (68k) for the Netscape and MSIE and iCab browsers for that. I generally try and offer a simple page, and that will work in most browsers with a little adjustment. My favorite browser is Mozilla Firebird, second one is Opera 6.12.

I'd really like to see a simple plug-in that adds only one visible element to the standard interface, a smiley/frownie face, ala iCab, that indicates whether the HTML of the page actually validates to the DTD declared in the document itself. Clicking on a frownie face would bring up a list of validation errors. This would be a great tool for site developers, making mistakes quickly visible.

It would be an even better tool for standards evangelism if it was included in the default installation of Mozilla/Phoenix. Then you'd turn the entire population of Mozilla users into nitpickers, who would hound site developers about lack of standards compliance.

From personal experience, nothing makes you fix problems faster than users regularly sending you e-mail about things that are broken. So making it obvious when things are broken would lead to more feedback, and more feedback would lead to more standards-compliant websites.

Which would be good for Mozilla, and all other browser developers who work towards standards-compliance.

How about this as a middle ground: Have a check-box on the browser toolbar, call it "Emulate IE", and when it's checked, it looks just like IE would render it. Then the browser can also render "correctly", but when I go to a site that was coded for IE specific extensions, it renders it that way. That would be ideal for me.

There is a browser, iCab, that has this feature, though it is a check box in the prefrences. Unfortunately for you it is only a mac program and no windows version is planned.

a great trick to get rid of embedded ads (banners and iframes) using plain CCS and the always amazing Mozilla flexibility and openness.

If you use a Macintosh, get iCab. It prevents JavaScript from opening windows that are not requested by the user, and can filter out banner ads by size or URL.

Windows users might wish to try Opera. While not quite as flexible as iCab, stopping popups is easy with Opera.

FInally, ask your ISP to start using Spamassassin. My ISP recently began using SpamAssassin and now, I can go for days without getting any spam, and the two or three that do slip through are helpfully labeled with a (SPAM?) tag by SpamAssassin.

iCab, available only for the Mac, is one of the best browsers I have seen as far as privacy goes.

It can filter images based on the server, link, size, or anything else.
It can filter cookies based on the server, duration, or anything else.
it can filter JavaScript (InScript) based on server, action, or anything else.

One of the best features: You can set it to only use "Referer" from within the same domain. So if I link to a Sony.com page from Slashdot, Sony has no idea how I got to the page. But Sony can track how I navigate their site (You can also set iCab to never send referer:)

There are more features than I could ever list here. Suffice to say it is very powerful and very configurable. Anyone using MacOS deserves to look at it.

it is still missing a few things, and it is compliant to a fault at times (with regards to page layout), but I use it for 99.5% of my browsing without and problems.

iCab, available only for the Mac, is one of the best browsers I have seen as far as privacy goes.

It can filter images based on the server, link, size, or anything else.
It can filter cookies based on the server, duration, or anything else.
it can filter JavaScript (InScript) based on server, action, or anything else.

One of the best features: You can set it to only use "Referer" from within the same domain. So if I link to a Sony.com page from Slashdot, Sony has no idea how I got to the page. But Sony can track how I navigate their site (You can also set iCab to never send referer:)

There are more features than I could ever list here. Suffice to say it is very powerful and very configurable. Anyone using MacOS deserves to look at it.

it is still missing a few things, and it is compliant to a fault at times (with regards to page layout), but I use it for 99.5% of my browsing without and problems.

I have a Wells Fargo account, and while I quite like their online banking site, I have them squarely in the "Sinners" column when it comes to browser support. The problem is that their site accepts and rejects browsers based purely on browser strings, without regard to the brower's actual capabilities.

Since my favorite browser, iCab for Mac OS X, is neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer, I have to tweak it's browser string. When I do it connects with only a few glitches. Their denied browser page and browser test page essentailly claim that nothing except Internet Explorer and Netscape meet their "strict security standards." But what they actually enforce is a policy that only allows browsers that claim to be Netscape or Internet Explorer.

I have called the number they provide to point out this problem, but the person on the other end of the call clearly didn't think there was anything that she could do about the problem and told me that I'd be better of expressing my opinion on their Contact Us page.

Lastly, not having lots of web-authoring savvy, I found the following two pages extremely informative on the subjects of browser and object detection:

Browser Detection
Object Detection

I think this guy's main point is that browser detection should be used to make your page more compatible by altering subtle aspects of a page to cater to certain browsers' eccentricities (read "bugs") but it is often used (abused) to make pages less compatible by turning away the browsers the author thinks won't work. To actually detect a browsers capabilities, object detection should be used.

I know iCab has this feature already, for about 3 or 4 releases now. I also thought it was really slick, until I saw the first patch release to keep it from pre-fetching "logout" links. (Oops.) It seems like Mozilla has circumvented that problem, by requiring the designer to provide the hints. OTOH, iCab did have a GUI to [dis|en]able this feature. I think Mr. Clauss would do well to see how this feature goes over with the Mozilla crowd, and incorporate the "hinting" idea if it works. Pre-fetch with good hints would be a boon to my wife and I - we only have 56k at home. I would hope that I could add rel="prefetch" to A tags as well as LINK tags, too.