Slashdot Mirror

Although I agree that I Netscape has a disproportionate number of links to their own banner ads, I'm guessing that IE has a few more than just one.

It's things like this which make me look towards the next generation of browsers-- I love iCab's ability to ignore images based on what path they have (eg, any path with '/ads/' in it, or on a machine named 'ads') or the image size (1x1 pixels, or the standard banner sizes).

How they handle cookies is nice, too, as you're allowed to reject or accept domains as a whole, while still prompting for all others.

For those people who don't have a Mac, you probably have one or two hold out friends with one, so have them grab a copy, and you'll see what I mean:

http://www.icab.de/

[oh...and it's under 2megs, too....although they're still working on CSS support]

All I see from Netscape is a much needed update for a buggy product; it's not a significant break through, even if it was a complete code re-write..

• It hasn't crashed yet under OS 9.0.4.
• I'm a little confused by the preferences. There's no place to enter mail server information, for example.
• It's not at all clear how to import my helper applications, or how to tell it to use Internet Config for that.
• The Bookmarks editor is a dog - slow and buggy.
• The Cookie management appears to be much improved over 4.76, but is clumsy compared to iCab.
• I'm not impressed with the new "modern" theme.

My browser of choice? iCab. If you're on a Mac, this browser rocks. Fast, small, highly cusomizable, tightly integrated into the MacOS, and more preferences than you can shake a stick at. No proprietary tags or other BS, either... just strickt HTML 4.0 compliance. This baby kicks the butt of both "mainstream" browsers by delivering something that both browsers should be. The final release should ship in January, and be feature-complete by that time. (The only thing that's lacking right now is lack of CSS & XML support, and the JavaScript is still a little buggy.) Everyone that's used this browser for a day or two has switched and never looked back.

When this puppy hits prime-time, look the hell out.
---

Quit dissing the MacOS... the only thing at fault here is IE. I'm using iCab and the word is broken up fine. I'd like to see how IE on Windows breaks this up... but unfortunately there are no good screenshot capture utilities for Windows. (OK, I'm talkin' out my ass, but nothing as good as Snapz, and nothing included with the OS.)

Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;

1. Opera
2. gecko
3. icab

P.S.: anybody knows why k-meleon 0.1 wants to act as a server?

iCab isn't even final yet. It's not iCab v2.1, it's iCab Preview Release 2.1 (see their site). So when the article says:

For example, you have to turn on InScript, which is iCab's partial implementation of JavaScript, because it's not enabled by default.

it's because they haven't worked out all the bugs in it yet. iCab comes configured in a way that allows it to best work for the user. When InScript is finished (when the browser is finished) it will be on by default.

One other note...they say it's slow on fast connections. It's snappier on my G4 over ADSL than IE5 is...connections are swifter, layout goes faster, etc. My only complaint with this version is that it doesn't support CSS yet. But it's coming.

It's that little smiley face in the upper right corner of the browser window. It smiles when a webpage is well formed and fully standards compliant, and it frowns for the vast majority of the web which isn't. If you go to their partial list of pages with a smile, you'll find that slashdot isn't listed. And with good reason: "Altogether 1765 errors found. Only 25 errors are listed below", is the first line of its status report.

I use iCab as my main browser (and i have managed to convince several other people to do likewise). It is what a browser should be, no extra crap like mail and news, and that is what makes it small and svelte. (not that a mail client needs, or even should be, all that large).

The article failed to mention that iCab lets you filter java applets and javascript in mostly the same ways that you can filter images. It also has a built in html checker which is really neat, if the page is "correct", it has a little smily face, if there are errors, there is a frouney face which you can click on to get a list of errors. Double click on one of the errors to highlight the relivent section of the source.

If you make a page that makes iCab smile, (like mine) iCab will put a link to it from their site if you email them about it.

You'd be surprized at who came out on top. The ugliest of the lot won.

Well, iCab may be ugly, but it's still in beta! Sheesh.

It's been my default browser for a while -- it's great being able to set which sites can use JavaScript and can open new windows, and filtering ads, and all sorts of nifty stuff.

-j

At work (Windows) I use InterMute (now "AdSubtract") and at home (Mac) I browse with iCab. I haven't seen an ad on the web in weeks...

It is my understanding that the M$ software for Mac is developed by a fairly autonomous group. Whatever the situation, they have recently released some great 'very Mac' software in IE and Outlook Express, although they did wierdly reinvent some things for OE. Sadly, IE 5 for Mac is miles ahead of Netscape/Mozilla, and iCab isn't quite there yet.

My point is that MS can make good software, if you judge software by the expectations of the majority of the users of the targeted platform. What does this mean for Linux if/when Office and IE are ported? How would Office for Linux have to be different than Office for Win and Office for Mac to truly be a Linux application worth using?

From the outside, the coolest and most admirable thing about the Linux community is Open Source and everything implied by that. I don't think MS could release a real Linux app, if this is held to be fundamental to truly be considered as a Linux app.

Ah well. back to iCab.

iCab does one better and letter you automatically block all cookies not sent by the server hosting the page you are visiting. Mac only though.

I know of at least one browser, iCab for the Mac that allows you to filter images based on several factors: server the image is coming from, path of the url, filename, etc. All of this is customizable, and comes with several known ad companies' domain's blocked out already.
I use it to filter banner ads, but after reading this article, I realize it could also be used to stop WebBugs. The rest of iCab is so-so, BTW. It crashes a lot randomly. Although a new version just came out today (1.2) and I have yet to try it. Anyone want to add this to Netscape? :)
--
I don't follow the pack, but I'll follow a really cute girl.

Don't think I like the fact that the best browser available comes from the Borg. I lie in bed praying for the day when "ECMAScript" finally makes it into iCab. But even an anti-M$ bigot like me can recognize that Micro~1's IE/Mac team have turned out the most standards-compliant browser currently available. It's not too bloated either. And since Version 4, IE/Mac has provided the kind of cookie control that is currently such big news for IE/Windows.

My bad, I meant this page.

You'll not only see M16 doesn't render correctly, but that IE 5 does better in some areas.

what is a HTML 4 quoting entity? I don't see anything strange on the test page you sent.

BTW many thanks for the above link, I just posted 2 bug reports for Mozilla with that link as a reference. We've just made the browser better.

Please refer me to a URL that is standards compliant that doesn't work in Mozilla.

Well, let's see. There's this one, for starters. Or, for that matter, any piece of text using HTML 4 quoting entities. Like this one. Which Lynx and IE 4+ all render just fine.

but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information

Amen. Netscape is a festering sore on the HTML world, with a complete inability to render a huge chunk of the HTML 4 standard.

What really ticks me off is that Mozilla is still not much better. Point a browser at this test to see, or try using the HTML 4 standard quoting entities, and watch M!6 go for a loop.

icab. Trust me.

In defence of netscape: I alternate between iCab and Netscape. It crashes sometimes, but not as often as some posters have made out. Maybe the Mac port is more stable than the others - i've also used it on my brother's linux box, and on PCs at work, and those ports don't look as nice, or seem as stable.

I checked your site in iCab and it does report one error/warning in the html on your page:

Warning (20/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" should only contain absolute pixel values.

The page does seem to render fine in iCab, though.

iCab for the Mac lets you toggle whether JavaScript can open new windows or not. Too bad we'll never see a similar feature in Netscape or IE, now that mainstream sites (like AOL and MSN...and Disney, for Pete's sake!) use pop-ups.

-jon

You'll find that the "*nix community" isn't going to be the only bunch of people using Linux in the near future. There are plenty of businesses who'd love to dump NT if they still get to run Office.

And btw, do yourself a favor and download and use icab instead of IE.

I'm not certain what level of HTTPS iCab supports, but as of the latest preview release (2.0) SSL and HTTPS are supported.

iCab uses Apple's URL Access SDK for that, which is included in MacOS 8.6 and higher.

I agree that iCab is looking really good. But as a Mac user too, I welcome anything that's not Micros~1, as do most /.-ers, I assume. This is why I have been trying every Mozilla milestone since M10, and why I'm an alpha tester for MacOpera. We need alternatives, we need choice, we need support for standards.

However, I agree that a nightly build is hardly newsworthy.

Unfortunately, both IE and Netscape/Mozilla are turning into bloatware and as a Mac user I'm starting to look to other projects, such as iCab. How can I justify allocating 30MB of memory to one program ?

Stability aside (I know these shouldn't be considered in milestone builds), the last milestone build I tried was visually appalling. The user interface didn't seem to conform to anything on earth (mind you, does Quicktime or Sherlock ?) and the speed seemed to have taken a nosedive, with the HD thrashing away. (I assume the debug info is still in there).

Someone has already made comments that more Mac coders could be done with on that particular build, but I'm not sure they'll get them. When Apple signed the deal with M$ to make IE the browser of choice, it was the nail in the coffin for any other browser, and I think it's starting to show. I don't like IE, but at the same time, I'm starting not to like Netscape either. It's gradually being assimilated into the AOL ways.... yuk.

Just my 2p. I'm not sure a milestone release is newsworthy - a beta maybe...

M.

Are you a sysadmin? Have you considered setting up a Junkbuster proxy alongside your Squid caching proxy and recommending it to your users? You can save a lot of bandwidth by letting your users opt out of banner ads. Most of them don't like 'em any more than you do.

(If you use Debian on your server systems, Junkbuster is available in both slink (the current stable release) and potato (the current beta release) as the package "junkbuster".

If you use a Macintosh for your home system, as I do, I recommend to you the iCab Web browser, which almost exactly duplicates the image-filtering abilities of Junkbuster -- right there in your browser configuration.)

Advertisers do not have any right to your bandwidth or your private information. However, you need not rely on the FTC or any other branch of government to protect you, your children, or your institution's resources. And if you're only willing to stand up for your rights if government will help you -- then what rights do you really have?

available here. It also allows finer grained control, like only permitting cookies to be accepted from certain sites, besides being a superior browser.

iCab on Mac OS takes a different, very successful approach to this. It lets you skip images that are contained in a specified subdirectory, say /ad or /advert, as well as images from known ad-servers. In practice, this blocks about 95% of ad images. The only bad side-effect I've had is on The Register which puts some strange images (like the little cartoon graphics in their BOFH features) in /advert for some reason. Still, this approach by and large works great, and it's totally user configurable.

Do any Windows or Linux browsers? (Honest question)

1. Set iCab as your default browser in your Internet control panel.
2. Open the movie site in Navigator (so that the JavaScript runs properly).
3. When you click on the link to load the movie, iCab will pop out of nowhere with its Download Manager and begin downloading the movie file itself.

For Windows (and eventually Linux, it's alpha now) check out Opera. For Macs ICab is excellent.

The feature that *I* would like to see In the next netscape/Mozilla is one that allows a regex list to specify domains to allow or ignore cookies. I realize that I could do this with Junkbuster, but Junkbuster does some things I don't particularly care for so I don't run it. Adding this ability into the browser really is trivial given the overall complexity of the project.

Much as I hate to admit it, Internet Explorer is the browser to beat, largely because of M$'s [illegal?] bundling of it with the OS

Funny, IE for the Mac is a /totally/ superior product to Navigator, and there's no OS bundling going on there. Microsoft has (finally?) produced a quality product, in IE 4.5 for the Mac, and this should be the baseline for Mozilla to shoot at.

I build a new Mozilla out of CVS every couple of days on my Linux box at work, and it's getting very much better than it used to be. Soon it will surpass the (wretchedly bad) Navigator 4.x in functionality, and I can switch over for my daily work. The Mozilla team is to be commended for producing a workable, complex piece of software.

That said, it's still unusable for me -- I can't abide by the software crashing every 10 minutes or so. And it sadly looks like the Mozilla team is shooting at doing nothing better than replacing the state of the art from two years ago.

Why is are precious tuits being spent on replicating the worst parts of the comically inept Communicator? Why is there a mail/news client? Why is there a html editor? Neither of those two components address the true problem with the Free Software universe (at least as regards to web parity with the non-Free platforms): web browsing.

In addition, it'd be nice to see the adaptability of iCab, in particular, the excellent support for cookie management and content filtering. A free browser that did NOTHING BUT BROWSE would be huge huge winnage.

Just my .02$.

(jfb)

You didn't actually forget to say "filters", but you forgot to say it in bold and say it repeatedly: Filters Filters Filters. Filters are the single biggest reason to use iCab over Netscape.

For those of you who don't already know, iCab has (built in) many of the features that normally require a non-caching local proxy like Junkbusters to achieve, and even then iCab usually does better. Image filtering by host (up yours, doubleclick.net), path name, file name, dimensions (ever notice how most ads are 468x59 or 468x60?), etc. Control over which cookies to accept and keep, which to discard, all done without the annoyance of "Don't you want to accept this cookie? If you want me to stop asking, you'll have to turn all cookies off or accept them all regardless."

Technically iCab isn't even a standalone, since it will let you send email. It sure is lightweight, though.

I actually have a site that was fully HTML 4.0 compliant and rendered perfectly in Communicator and iCab, but incorrectly in IE5. When I tweaked the code to render correctly in IE, it wasn't compliant anymore, but it displayed correctly in all three browsers.

This is a problem I've had more than once. iCab and Opera are the only browsers that seem to consistently render compliant HTML correctly.

--

iCab, a great little alternative browser for Mac OS, already has a built in HTML validator. It displays a little happy or sad face depending on whether the HTML is valid, and face can be clicked for a list of errors. I haven't found a single web page that's actually fully compliment, with the exception of the pages on the iCab site. It's amazing how crappy the HTML on even large commercial sites is. There are several dozen errors on the Yahoo index page, for example.

--

Most of the nifty new features (scrapbooks and auction manager) aren't really working yet, but promise to be useful. The new look is ... wierd. Most of the usual Mac rumors sites have screenshots up. It is, however, not as bad as it looks in a screenshot when actually used. And the nifty little touches, like easily rearranging the toolbar buttons are very nice.

The darn thing is also more stable than any Netscape product (prior to 4.7) they've ever put on a Mac. I'll have to check the final version (March?) to see how cooperatively it multitasks (I had to turn 4.5's priority down so other apps would run properly with it in the background).

At the very least, this particular version of IE does not suck.

And as for RAM claims, Microsoft marketing and package design always claims the absolute minimum RAM partition in which the program will launch and display a blank document, this bears no resemblance whatsoever (often by an order of magnitude for intensive tasks) to what the program needs for useful work. Note especially that the default RAM allocations for all MS Office products on the Mac *will crash* the machine regularly, and must be increased (usually, IME, Apple bears the blame for this, they have had enough problems lately without being blamed for an MS mistake).

I know of at least three other browsers that support JavaScript. OmniWeb for Mac OS X, iCab pre1.9 (Mac Only), and Opera which is cross-platform. There are probably others too.

Users of the iCab browser will find that it can filter cookies (and images too) based on domain (and a few other rules).

It's a Mac only browser, and is still in pre-release. It's lacking Javascript, but has a remarkably small memory and disk footprint, it's also about half again as fast as IE or Netscape on a Mac.

iCab website.

What Mozilla needs is what a little 3rd party MacOS browser upstart iCab has: the ability to ask before accepting cookies, and refuse all cookies from that domain from that point on. It is a lot more useful, because if some horrible site uses 5 cookies, or the admin has put on multiple-retry Apache cookieing it doesn't matter if you keep on hitting cancel, cancel, cancel, because it will take lots of time for them to go away.

Any status reports on Mozilla as to whether this is possible with the latest?

The iCab web browser iCab web browser allows filtering of page images by source (server, path, filename, and URL) and by dimension (eg 1 pixel x 1 pixel). It comes preconfigured to filter out images from double-click and friends. Check it out. This browser is free and surprisingly smart and configurable.

For Macs there's WebFree, which can block ads in IE and Communicator, or the rather nice but also rather beta iCab browser, which has ad filtering abilities built in.

--

That's only an issue if you *want* your browser to do everything. I don't know if I'm the typical Mac user at all, but I certainly don't want to use mail and news within my browser. I have separate mail and news programs that I really like, and that run *faster* than the ones built-in to my browser, so I don't need those capabilities in the browser at all and certainly wouldn't miss them.

Once JavaScript and CSS support are complete in iCab, and it's out of beta, I just might switch over to iCab as my primary browser. I really like the browser so far (speedy, non-bloated), but I need more stability than the betas have shown.

Of course, Mozilla might be so amazingly cool that I won't need to switch. We'll see. So far the milestone builds crash way too fast and it takes up too much HD space for me to do any extensive testing, though I'd like to test it more.

See http://www.icab.de/info.html for iCab's features -- it really is quite a bit beyond Netscape 2.0. (And you can see java applets with it, though I don't bother -- I haven't yet found a site that was worth turning java on.)

iCab also has full PNG support. It's a very good browser, if you use a Mac:)

There is on feature I want in a browser and still haven't seen anywhere. I want a button that goes to the main page of the website.

e.g. when I'm browsing http://www.foobar.org/foo/bar.html and I press this button the browser has to go to http://www.foobar.org/

does anyone know if there is feature like this in Mozilla?

I would love it if someone implements a "standard links" toolbar similar to the one in iCab that uses the properties set in the LINK tag -- there's a "home" button that takes you to the link defined as "home" by the LINK tag, a "next" button for the "next" link, etc.

It's not quite the same thing as what you describe, but it'd be a lot more useful (assuming everyone starts using the LINK tags). For example, what would be the "main page" of the photo gallery at my home page at http://members.xoom.com/trentc/pictures.html? Would it be:

http://members.xoom.com/
or
http://members.xoom.com/trentc/?

Jay (=

Let me take this opportunity (for those of you who use Macs) to plug iCab. Its cookie handling is close to perfect. You can set a preference to accept, reject, ask, or accept but expire all cookies at the end of the session. The cookie-query dialog displays the cookie name, data, expiration date, and server, and has options to accept or reject, to auto-expire at the end of the session, and to add this server to the always-accept or always-reject list.

It's also in a user interface that makes all this a lot simpler than my explanation. ;-) Has selective blocking of images (by server or by dimensions) and applets, too, and a built-in list of common banner sizes.

the closest i've seen yet is a feature in IE4/mac

Have a look at iCab

It's the MOST customizable browser out there for the Mac when it comes to cookies and image filters.

The two best features for cookies are two lists, one that says "Always accept from:" and one that says "Always reject from:"
Put in your favourites, and go nuts!
Not to mention that iCab renders HTML fast as a bunny, and there's no JavaScript to bog the thing down. Oh, and if you write HTML, it'll make you clean up your sloppy code really quickly :)
It's the best way to read Slashdot when the articles get really long.

One thing: it's still Beta, so make sure you have MacsBug installed.
It'll crash occasionally, but with MacsBug, just type "ea" to quit the app and return to the Finder.
It crashes VERY cleanly for a Beta product! :)

PPoE