Wherein I finally give up and send iCab out to gentle green pasture.
I didn't mind when it crashed once or week or so. I only minded
somewhat when it began crashing every day, sometimes even twice a day.
It was
that even when you brought it back up, it didn't work right: buttons
wouldn't work, or would disappear entirely. Then you
wouldn't be able to open links. In the end I could never set it right
until I did a restart. All the more tireing because I usually had eight
or so windows open in the background in advance of reading anything -
confessions of 56k dial-up user. All of which then have to be
re-opened. It seemed to be an artifact of servers negotiating with iCab
about setting cookies and rules about pop-up window behavior. Reuters
wouldn't want doubleclick to show me that same side-bar flash ad twice.
iCab didn't seem to be replying fast enough, or maybe the servers
didn't like what they were hearing. Hard to say. It would just wink out
with not so
much as a "the application iCab has quit unexpectedly" dialog box,
which is usually a sign that the event wasn't a complete surprise to
your machine's operating system.
So I switched to Firefox. The only real
holdback was that Firefox wouldn't import iCab's bookmarks
automatically. I had to sling them over by hand. Bookmarks; I must have
four or five hundred of them. Most are from four or more years ago - BG
- before google. I got a bookmark for the comic book Too Much Coffee
Man, one for Opus Dei (not the band -go figure), the World bank, and one that documents
old movie theatres, one for Edmund Husserl (heck I got three for Karl Popper), and one for Helena Bonham Carter - I loved her in Fight Club. I toyed with Mozilla's
other browser for OSX Camino - which could import iCab's book marks but
couldn't do much else. Well, It's still a 0.8 pre-release. Now if
Camino can import iCab bookmarks why can't Firefox.
I feel bad for dumping iCab; though, it has been nice seeing what
sites look like in cascading style sheet layout. MicroSoft has a
whole division working on Explorer, sameways Apple on Safari, Mozilla a
first rank open source project. iCab
is pretty much one guy, Alexander Clauss, and the dream of a browser as
a standards obeying scooting taxi-cab of the world wide virtual
metropolis. I liked that dream, and a lot of things he got right,
little things like being able to fine tune the contextual menu - being
able to set the interval for hold-click to equal option-click. I'll be
back to check out his 3.0 version when it's done, and I still use it on
the machine I still run OS 8.6 on, where it doesn't crash except on
tompaine.com which kills it every time, but I can't go on rebooting the
iBook twice a night.
11:33:35 PM  ;;
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