iCab Mobile (Web Browser)

I’m not a Mac user, but I’ve had an iPhone since the 2nd version. I’ve tried many browsers to deal with Safari’s issues and lack of features, and I never gave this shot. Apparently it’s been around since the early days. Probably as long as the App Store has been serving up irrelevant results. That’s another issue though. I was looking for a way to keep pages from reloading while I was reading them and found a forum post recommending this. The user seemed very knowledgeable and actually said it was his default for several years. That’s when I looked at the date and realized the post was nearly 12 years old and the answer was a repost even older! I checked it out anyway and as always in the App Store- I sorted reviews my positive, critical and recent to get a picture of the current state of things. I looked at the version history to make sure it’s actively supported. And I looked for subscription requirements. I was happy to see this developer still earning praise for good work after all this time. My guess is this tool is used and developed for personal use as well. After installing, I immediately noticed many more features than are in the listing. I’m very excited to see how this works out!

We’ve employed various versions of iCab on diverse Apple devices for generations. Often very useful for making use of “obsolete” devices out of their time. The most difficult thing is remembering which of the many features have not yet been implemented. NOTE: iCab has a macOS version that syncs with this mobile version. The current macOS version of iCab is still $10 nagware “shareware,” and is still not available on the Mac App Store. If iCab for macOS has not yet been paid for and registered, whenever iCab is open in the foreground or background, the unmovable nag window pops back to the foreground regularly, even if it and iCab have been hidden using the menu bar iCab > Hide iCab feature. This can be annoying, tiresome, and distracting while attempting to use another browser to research currently appropriate iCab Preferences settings and filters to initially setup iCab, while being frequently interrupted by other work and (for whatever reasons) not yet being in a position to actually register iCab for macOS. So remember, don’t bother to try and install and setup iCab for macOS on a new Mac user account unless you’re already in position to register (have ready access to your relevant email account, previous registration information or a payment method, internet connection already enabled for iCab, etc.). [This is at least the fourth or fifth time we’ve run into this over the years, previously forgetting it is an issue.] [Please update this review with the currently best recommended ad block filters for iCab’s Preferences, if you’ve managed to figure that out!]

iOS 12.3 seems to have broken the URL / search input field. When text is entered to attempt to do a Google (or whatever) search, or when entering a URL, instead the current page is searched like a “find” command. A failed “search in page” message box pops up in either case which leaves you and the browser dead in the water. You can still select from your bookmarks but that’s about it. Can’t type in anything new, unless you manually add a bookmark for a search engine or something else. I have not been able to fix this by changing anything in settings, not even “combined URL+Search Field”. This is a real show stopper with the 12.3 update. The other problem I have always had is that on older style textual “bulletin board” type forums that involve lots of hyperlinks up and down the page, iCab usually doesn’t “Go to” the right place when you click a link; in other words it goes to the wrong message which is a bit annoying. It sometimes returns to a previously visited link and in other cases seems to go some fixed percentage of the way up or down the page. So I have to do a whole bunch of manual scrolling to get to the right place and this is constantly! Even given the above, iCab is still pretty much the only browser I’ll use on iOS (but the URL field problem has to be fixed pronto!)