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Chimera also is an 8 meg download that expands to a 25+ meg executable.

iCab, another lean browser for the Mac, weighs in at about a 2.3 meg download that expands to about five megs (not exactly sure on those figures, I am not at my OS X box).

Feature for feature, I would put it with any browser. About the only thing that it does not have is tabbed browsing, but it makes up for that with some of the most complete filtering and security you could imagine. I use Chimera for the few sites that iCab does not work with, and I keep wanting to go back to iCab.

Want to save your Slashdot cookie forever, reject all Doubleclick cookies, save apple.com cookies until the end of the session, and be prompted for all others? You can do that.

Want pop-ups to work on this site, but not on that one? Done.

Want "Open in rear window" as a contextual menu option? Done.

Want BestBuy.com to know you as using a Mozilla client so their stupid DB pages work and everyone else to see iCab, without ever having to manually switch? Done.

Want to never send "Referrer" headers except for the stupid sites that require it, or to just send referred headers within the same domain? Done.

Want to completely turn JavaScript off on this site, but leave it on for all other sites without manually changing it before entering the site? Done.

Want to reject all images from DoubleClick? Done.

Want a browser so HTML compliant it ships with a validator? Done.

A five meg browser can do all of this on MacOS X and Mac OS 8/9.

This is the type of browser I want to see.

I'd like the browser to halt with a 'Error: Page invalid' myself. If IE (and all browsers) would do this for nonvalidating HTML and CSS I'd say we'd see things improving pretty fast.

It doesn't halt on invalid HTML, but iCab has an indicator on the address bar that tells you if a page uses valid or invalid HTML and/or CSS. Something similar in Mozilla would be nice.

(BTW, iCab doesn't think much of /.'s HTML, but that comes as no surprise.)

iCab!

This is somewhat off topic, but I gotta say iCab rules. It renders quickly; has a nice, responsive UI; all kinds of customizable filters for javascript, ad banners, etc.; is relatively standards complient; and has a built in syntax checker. No email, newsreader, or composer to bloat the package. I prefer it to OmniWeb. Now let's see if Apple can produce something as flexible.

I'd have to say that's one of the greatest ways to tweak OS X that I've found. I'm using an original iMac on a broadband connection (college campus serviced by multiple DS3 lines -- it's great) and huge /. comments pages show up as fast as iCab can render them. BTW, I have found iCab to be dramatically faster than any other browser on OS X, and trust me, I've tried them all. Maybe it's just my combination of older hardware and a fast connection, but iCab smokes every other browser out there.

For OSX users out there, iCab does this as well. It limits the javascript that a site can execute by the effect and by the site so that I could, for example, block pop-ups on site1 and allow them on site2 but not ones that change window size, etc. Combine this with image filtering and the web becomes a much friendlier place, IMHO.

Of course we can use Mozilla too, but iCab is small and quick (it is not, regretably, open source).

btw, I am not in any way affiliated with iCab, just a long term satisfied user.

in case i'm not the only one who had never heard of icab until this article, here's their web page place. i've used it for 5 minutes and am impressed by its configuability. better ad-blocking than moz and omniweb, for example. freeish, in development. mac oses only.

iCab is a browser that isn't on your list. You might want to give it a try. I prefer OmniWeb -- it's a shame you're having trouble getting it to work, because it really takes the MacOSX UI to heart. Try the latest nightly build (Omni calls them sneakypeaks). It might help.

You've missed out on iCab, the German-engineered lightweight browser for Mac OS and Mac OS X. It's officially still in beta, but it's quite stable. It supports the usual assortment of standards, Netscape plug-ins, and a nice array of extra features such as image filtering and per-site JavaScript restriction.

If you're interested in a standards compliant browser for the mac allow me to recomend icab. It also has great ad filtering and a number of other features that ie lacks.

iCab is another excellent browser. I find it much faster rendering web pages than OmniWeb 4 (though I haven't tried the latest "sneakypeak&quot).

For all the reasons that you state, I:

• do not write web pages that work only in IE or Netscape. If your page doesn't work in Lynx, it doesn't work.
• do not falsify my USER_AGENT. When I'm using iCab, your server sees iCab.
• do not use Internet Explorer at all. If your page doesn't work in iCab, Opera, or Netscape, then I don't need to do business with you.

And there was much rejoicing!

iCab, the Macintosh-only browser, has a sophisticated set of filtering options, including a site by site option regarding what a site is permitted to do to your browser via JavaScript.

Much like Opera, iCab is small, fast and the development team understands that it's YOUR browser, YOU decide what a site can and cannot do with your computer and browser.

iCab is currently not commercially available, they're are releasing free, incremental beta upgrades as they progress towards the first commerical release.

When iCab does ship their "for pay" version, I'll be among the first to buy it!

Yes, there is a Mac OS X version available, too.

Lots of Mac browsers do, including OmniWeb, iCab, and the Mac version of IE. I doubt Apple has any desire at all to sue over it.

Is bug 66054 what you're talking about?

I haven't looked extensively at RDF yet, other than the possibility of using RSS. It seems cool though. Maybe, like with <link>, I just need to see one good implementation to open my eyes to the possibilities.

Lynx has had it almost forever. Mosaic had it. Even though I'd been using <link rel="author"> since I started making web pages, I first realized the possibilities when I saw it in iCab. There are a few others. Here are a few good articles about it.

• Jakob Nielsen's structural navigation article
• Sander's <link> page (Sander now works for Opera)
• Matthias' browser page

I just checked MSN.com here on my mac, and I still can't get in with either Mozilla 0.9.4 or 0.9.5 (I downloaded the update specifically to check). However I can get in fine with Netscape 4.78 (it doesn't crash, either).

Now, I also checked with iCab Pre2.5.3 and it was letting me in at first... but I noticed i had told it to say it was IE 5 for mac. I switched its user-agent string to "iCab/2.5.3 (Macintosh; I; PPC)" and got blocked. Same if I use "Lynx/2.8 (compatible; iCab 2.5.3; Macintosh; I; PPC)".

However, the following user-agent allowed me to get in: "Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; iCab 2.5.3; Macintosh; I; PPC)".

So it seems they're not just blocking Mozilla and Opera like some thought, but are broadly blocking non-IE and non-Netscape browsers.

I've never used Opera myself; is the functionality to change the user-agent string built into the browser?

Opera provides a couple pre-defined strings you can use that spoof other browsers while still saying "Opera" somewhere. OTOH, iCab allows user-definable UA strings as well as providing some pre-defined ones, IIRC.

If you like OmniWeb, also check out iCab for OS X

It allows you to filter InScript/JavaScript on a site by site basis. For each site, you can allow/disallow the following:

-access 'Referer'
-access history
-write in status line
-create cookies
-ask for cookies
-open windows
-change window size/location
-hide toolbars

It also has excellent cookie filtering. Between OmniWeb and iCab I can deny anything. :)

Another alternative web browser for Mac OS X, OmniWeb handles this extremely well.

While it doesn't allow you to block JavaScript on a site-by-site basis, or turn on and off individual JavaScript actions, or have kickass image filters (all of which iCab does have)it does have one excellent feature:

Scripts are allowed to open windows only in response to a link being clicked.

Some (poorly designed) sites, require javascript popups for navigation, or an image thumbnail will often appear in a JS popup (like in many game screenshot galleries). Turning off JS completely makes it quite annoying to try and get around these sites. This feature works extremely well. No advertising Popups get through, yet JS can still create new windows when you explicitly click on the link, allowing you to navigate 95% of these sites.

As has been mentioned in other comments to this story, iCab for Macintosh does such things. There is a top-level menu item that turns JavaScript on and off. If someone emailed the authors requesting it, one would probably be added for Java. One can certainly filter JavaScript by site... and not just whether it's on or off, but which of like seven specific things ("open new windows", "access referrer", "access history") scripts can do... for each and every site one adds to the filter. Good software does exist.

The iCab folks keep a list of "10 features you don't find in other browsers", which would make an excellent checklist for other alternative browsers looking to add user-empowering features. Besides its abuse-blocking abilities, other iCab features that stand out include its built-in HTML validator; its recursive download manager (something like a GUIfied wget); and its "Link Manager", which summarizes all the links on a page and is quite useful when using any of the spammier search engines.

Sadly, the iCab folks have said they're not interested in porting to GNU/Linux. Among the GNU/Linux browsers, my favorite by far is Konqueror. Like iCab on the Macintosh, Konq is small, fast, and customizable. However, it still lags a bit behind in the way of filtering. Site-specific, function-specific JavaScript filtering would be an excellent addition to what's already easily the best browser in the Free world.

From their FAQ:

Will there be a version of iCab for Windows or Linux?

We are not interested in Windows and we believe that the graphical interface of Linux is not very good (compared to the Mac). We would like to focus on the Mac and want to make a good browser for Mac OS in the next few months.

So yeah, they're German Mac bigots. Guess it takes all types.

Yet another reason iCab is my favorite browser.

It has the most sophisticated filtering system I've seen. You can filter cookies using many criteria, including (my favorite) blocking cookies that come from a different domain from the main page. AND you can filter IMAGES by size, w/ options to exclude sizes including 1x1px (this blocks most web bugs) as well as most common advertisement sizes, like the ubiquitous banner. What you get instead is a blank banner-(or whatever-)sized space with an icon of a coffee filter in the corner. Hee!

And speaking as a web designer, the feature doesn't compromise the legitimate use of spacer GIFs.* Page design is preserved, and who cares if the 1-px. GIF is actually loaded or not.

*Yes, I know that with CSS we shouldn't need spacer GIFs. I will rejoice when browser support for CSS is consistent enough for us to rely on them. Meanwhile, though, clients still tend to expect web pages to be as as precisely designed as print, and sometimes you gotta cheat. But that's another discussion.

Anyone wanting to kill banner ads should see this. Of course, anyone using iCab has the exact feature the OP asked for.

I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.

Check out the icab browser for Macs at http://www.icab.de. You can filter ads based on their pixel sizes or the server they come from, and it's user customizable so you can add your own. A great idea we'll never see from IE or NS I imagine!

As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.

There's always WebWasher and iCab (iCab's a Mac browser, though).

Netscape 4 was the first browser I saw where the CSS was somewhat useful. Does anyone remember how badly IE 3 sucked? Sure, you have to limit yourself to a small subset (fonts, colors, some basic floats and alignment) but that subset is useful.

A year ago at this time I still restricted myself pretty much to that subset. Now, however, I am using CSS2 features pretty freely. N4 knows zilch about CSS2, so it's pretty safe, as opposed to certain CSS1 properties that it tries to work with and screws up. With Mozilla very stable (meaning a good N6 is just around the corner) and Opera (nearly ready on Linux and Mac) I feel pretty confident using CSS. I haven't used a FONT tag since 1997, and I've been validating my markup almost religiously for about 3 years.

Get ready for tomorrow today. N4 is dead. If the N4 folks complain, point them to Opera, or iCab if they're using a Mac.

On the contrary, my personal site (which is built with compliant HTML 4.0 and CSS) looks just fine on a wide variety of devices. This includes Mozilla, iCab, WebTV, Lynx, and AvantGo. Separate content from style and you'll never go wrong.

Precisely! Microsoft did the web an injustive when it went down the path of spoofing as Mozilla. Once they did, everybody had to. What would be so wrong with identifying as what you really are?

I always set my browsers (Opera, iCab) to ID correctly. If the site blocks me because they're using some idiotic detection script, I write the webmaster a nice letter. I'd love to see a button in the UI of these browsers to pop up a form letter to the page author or webmaster@<domain>.

http://www.webstandards.org/ gets a frowny face from the HTML validity checker in my current primary browser, iCab.

More specifically, it reports "Error: The defined widths of table cells are not consistent." The problem seems to be a width="25" in one of the td tags, which should be width="25%" to match the other rows.

I think if more browsers adopted an always-there error-checking interface like iCab's (a small face icon that is either a smiling green or frowning purple; clicking on it produces a detailed error report) then there would be a lot more pressure on developers to produce decent HTML. It is amazing how few web pages actually get it to smile.

BTW, /.'s HTML gets a much longer error report with its frowny face.

It's already out there (for Mac users) - There is a browser called iCab - It smiles if your HTML is valid and frowns if it's got errors in it. You can also click the face and it will list all the errors. I use it to validate all my websites. It's still in development, and the final version will be shareware. There must be similar stuff out there for M$ and *nix platforms...

While this isn't the strongest Mac site on the internet, a browser named iCab exists for the Mac. It is around 1.4MB in size (it uses 4MB of RAM however), and it supports HTML, XHTML, Java, (basic Javascript support...still in beta) and all sorts of cool features like ad banner blocking and cool stuff like that.

You're thinking of the accesskey attribute of HTML 4. Very nice, if you have a browser that supports it, like iCab. There may be others I'm not aware of or have forgotten at the moment.

Also, Opera allows you to access nearly all the browser features with keyboard commands. I don't think it supports accesskey (yet), so you can't move around in the document itself.

-ChristTrekker (moderating today)

I'm using iCab with the iCab identity script (not masquerading as IE or NS) and I'm not getting rejected! Hey, I use a Mac and a little known browser. Why won't they reject me? I feel so included and dirty...

And the checking is damn strict: one syntax error and all you see on the phone is 'invalid tag'. It would be nice if some popular browsers did that.

That's why I really hope Mozilla gets the iCab-like feature discussed in bug 6211. And I hope they put it right smack dab obvious in the UI like iCab, too.

If you use a Mac, download icab. It supports them all and has versions for MacOS 9 and X. It's currently in beta, but it will cost you about $30 once it's released.

will be the first to render HTML 4.0 bug-free.

It should be easy to hack JavaScript code in Mozilla and either deactivate popups forever or prompt for permission as it is already done for cookies. This would make Mozilla most user-friendly browser :-)

The Mac browser iCab lets you turn off specific features in JavaScript - status bar text, cookies, referring URLs, and yes, window popups.

Yes, I am a Raxis.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) publishes all its standards (the RFCs) for the Internet in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). You can also submit the document in PostScript, but the ASCII is the primary reference.

ASCII is searchable, printable, indexable, and forward compatible essentially forevermore. Everyone can display it correctly, anywhere. There is no better format for any kind of International standard. The IETF debates the question of superceding ASCII as the standard format about every other year, but we've yet to identify any other format that has ASCII's advantages.

HTML might one day replace ASCII in this capacity, but it needs to be stable for longer than it has been, and the HTML generators out there never generate correct HTML (ever looked at web pages in iCab? It has a built-in syntax checker, and even slashdot comes up with errors, all the time). Until those problems are fixed...

Yes, the Mac-only iCab does.

Its InScript (JavaScript) filters allow you to control what a JavaScript can do on a global and site for site basis.

iCab (Macintosh only) can filter a page's images and cookies based on pattern-matching the URL (http://*.doubleclick.net/*) and also has separate options for turning off aspects of JavaScript such as popups, status bar text, etc.

I am the Raxis.

iCab has filtering built into the browser. It can filter images baed on size, url, server, etc. It can filter ECMAscript (Javascript) on a site-by-site basis, and for each site can subfilter to disallow things like popups while allowing other things to occur.

iCab is small, fast. and standards compliant.

At least we're bright enough to understand the concept of more than one mouse button.

followed by:

I hate OS zealots; Linux, BSD, or Macintosh

Internal consistency error detected... post halted!

Two-button mouse support is in OS X. The new optical mouse is terrific. And not round.

Actually this already exists to an extent with LINK REL

The Dancing Jakob Nielsen wrote a short paper on its implementation in iCab.

----

For contrast, I submit iCab, a German browser (unfortunately Mac-only at this point), which implements (correctly, I might add) the HTML 4.0 standards, supports all those fancy features you describe (barring javascript, which is coming, and CSS, which is a bit underimplemented right now), weighs in at a whopping 3 megs on disk, and absolutely flies.

How do they do it? Well, iCab is the work of a single programmer (Alexander Clauss), and as such, has not grown to the point yet where (as most of us have experienced) time spent in communication between the parts of the project exceeds actual coding time.

Also, their design aim is different. IE and NS both plan on making money by driving revenue back to their parent companies. This forces IE to hawk Micro$oft products, and NS to serve up AOL ads. In contrast, iCab will be asking a very reasonable ($30, I think) price for the software, completely eliminating the need to embed advertising in the application. In fact, there are filtering features in the browser to filter out annoying banner ads, based on size or originating URL - one of my favorite features.

If only we could convince them to either release the source or accept a co-author to port it to Linux...

You should have a look at iCab, a nice, small and very popular browser for MacOS.
iCab is a 1Mb download, is extremely standard compliant, and can run with less that 5 Mb of ram.
... and you can use it on a Mac LC (68020 at 16Mhz, with 10 Mb ram) which is considerably slower than a 486/50.

See it at iCab Home Page.

That's because the page is full of HTML errors. The biggest error is not having </a> tags to close out the links! Also, it declares itself as an HTML 3.2 doctype, though it uses things like FRAMESET which are only part of the HTML 4.0 spec.

Granted, a good web browser (see ICab) should do its best to render the page anyway, but there's only so far that programmers can go to get around bad HTML programming.