Wow, I helped translate this (well, the iOS version) into Czech many many years ago! I’m glad it still exists, the author — Alex, if I remember right — is very friendly and a great developer.
It was my first “freelance” project; I didn’t even expect him to pay, I just liked his browser and wanted to feel like a grown man (was 14 at the time). But he insisted he’ll pay me; it was the first money I ever made. Ah, good memories. If the author sees this: Good luck!
Anyone remember the “Make iCab Smile” campaign? The UI featured a little smiley face in the corner that would change to a frown if there were too many HTML validation errors.
iCab Mobile is also one of the only truly unique iOS browsers. Was the only way to reliably download multiple files for years on iOS, and today still is the closest to having browser add-ons in iOS. Supported uploading files long before Safari too. Its custom zoom levels made many web apps usable on the original non-pro iPad screen sizes as you could fake a higher resolution screen (and you could change your user agent if websites refused to show their desktop version). You can tweak iCab's interface quite a bit too, which makes it a great way to make an internet appliance of sorts to show a single website without having extra toolbars and stuff.
It's not my default browser, but is a great tool to keep around!
iCab is my main browser on iOS, I love the configurability and the plethora of features. Safari has caught up quite a bit, but iCab is still the best IMHO.
Oh my God, I loved Camino so much! The browser scene for the Mac in the early Aught's was such a mess. Netscape was bloated, slow as hell, and wasn't keeping up with standards. IE was great, but you were always suspicious of MS's agenda. Safari was still a bit rough and lacked a lot of features.
Camino was snappy, clean, and had very good standards compliance. Such a great little browser!
Camino was awesome, one feature that I missed when I had to switch away from it was that its download list actually noticed when the files weren't there anymore (it's the small things that add up).
I even had a short look on how hard it would be to use the shell for a more modern engine, but it seems deeply entrenched in the Mozilla codebase, which is basically a dungeon full of undead, dragons and rust monsters.
Back in 2005 or so, I used Camino whenever a page insisted on being "IE only" — the browser seemed to have some magical compatibility layer built-in.
I still have it on my Mac, but it's only good for checking how pages look like if they're viewed on a browser that doesn't support the latest web standards.
Nostalgic! Very fast and interesting, and I like the style of it. I used that and Camino but Omniweb was my favourite browser. Had features I wish other browsers had now, and if they do it's not as easy, the interface was great.
I actually paid for it. Sad that there's not much to choose from nowadays.
I couldn't remember the name, but I looked it up and remembered the browser. I did try it out! It was nice, but wasn't enough to peel me away from Camino.
I loved iCab on both MacOS 9.x and on early iterations of OS X. Eventually, I started using Opera as my main browser on OS X, which had a lot of features that other browsers adopted a lot later, like tabs. Then Firefox came around, and the rest is history.
I recognise it from Mac OS 9 days, and downloaded it to try it again now.
Something I miss from Safari on Mac OS 10.9 was seeing full names in the tab bar. iCab, Chrome, and Firefox all shrink tabs down to their favicon.
Old versions of Safari would show the whole name, and if there wasn't space, it would overflow into a dropdown list on the right.
Yes, you probably can accuse me of opening too many tabs, but I have an amusing anecdote about how I recovered some front-end dev work from tab source when our DigitalOcean server crashed a few weeks ago.
What workflow could you have that your dev work on a DO server would be lost if you didn’t have the html in your browser? Are you direct editing apps on a DO server with no source control?
Why are all the screenshots on this page from 2007, and use 10.5 Leopard, if the browser doesn’t even support it anymore?
Oh, because the actual user interface did not change since then. A print button? The entire browser chrome over two times as large as Safari’s or Firefox’s? I don’t see the point in using iCab in 2020, let alone paying $10 for it.
Why does this keep happening? Browsers sell their soul to just be another coat of paint on top of WebKit. I honestly don't get it. If you're working on a web browser as a personal or open source project, switching to WebKit is basically just replacing the entire project that you've worked on, and then writing your name on WebKit. There's not much more to a browser than a rendering engine. There really isn't a killer feature that Chrome won't just absorb anwyay. So why on earth would you decide to throw away your years of effort, and solely try to differentiate yourself based on slight variations in how your back button looks or your bookmarks work!?
Back when Chrome was based on WebKit, my recollection is that WebKit was vaguely half the code. The other half was all the stuff that browsers do that's easy to overlook -- the network stack, process management, 2d graphics engine, cookie management, the URL bar, v8, extensions, etc. And these pieces are the very things that Chrome differentiated and succeeded based on.
(WebKit on Mac includes more of these things, but many of them rely on Mac-specific implementations, which weren't as useful for a browser that is primarily used on Windows.)
As important as politics and implementation diversity are, if I were to take on the monumental task of developing my own browser I would rather focus on improvements that are actually manageable and useful to me as an independent dev or small team. Browsers are more than just webviews with tabs and a lot of potential in the non-core parts is left unexplored by the major players.
And it's not like you're throwing away any effort. A browser isn't automatically worthless "just" because it's built on WebKit the same way an operating system isn't worthless "just" because it's built on Linux.
Modern HTML rendering engines are much much harder than you think, switching to webKit is a way to prevent obsolescence for any browser that doesn't have a huge team of devs behind it.
Is this space really evolving that much anymore though? I don't follow this field; what's been going on in web standards lately?
Seems like lately, from a user perspective, the current emphasis is mostly on doing the same things faster. So an indie browser developer probably won't get JS JIT down as well as a megacorp, but is that it? It seems to me like if you are standards compliant as of 5 years ago there shouldn't be a lot to do today.
I can understand why it might seem that way but it is actually evolving very quickly. Probably faster than any other time in history. There are a few things driving this evolution but I think the most important one is a desire to make the web a competitive platform for most types of software. This means lower level APIs, deeper integration with OS, and yes a large focus on performance. 3D graphics, offline support, push notifications, file system access, animation, Bluetooth, and more are all recent areas of focus for browsers.
Web browsers really are becoming similar to operating systems in scope.
There are a small number of people pushing that, but where is the adoption, and is the web at large really inaccesible without it? One example, I see a lot of websites offering to send me push notifications, and I always click no. A browser could not implement that feature and I would not notice, in fact it would be an improvement in experience.
Some very large companies are investing heavily in making the web the go-to platform for app developers. Google being the most obvious.
Web push notifications are usually not an essential part of web app experiences and I agree they have done more harm than good so far. Some of these features enable types of apps that were just not possible on the web before. Things like 3D games where WebGL/WebGPU would be essential, text editors where they don't function without access to the file system, or a browser based video chat app that uses WebRTC.
As these features become available in most browsers their adoption will increase and any browser that doesn't support them will not be able to access web apps or pages that depend on them.
What industry are you in that people aren't adopting web apps? At my work we use a ton of web-apps. Chrome-books offer nothing but web apps and they're doing pretty well these days.
OK, sure. My point is: how many of them hard-depend (no graceful failover) on APIs introduced in the last 5 years though? You could build a pretty good web app 5 years ago, and many people did. Has the fundamental abstraction changed that much? I'm extremely skeptical of the claim.
If somebody does depend on something obscure like javascript APIs for bluetooth [like someone in this thread cited], are they doing that as a desktop app with chromium embedded or are they a more traditional webpage? Does it completely fall over and explode if you don't have bluetooth support in the browser? That would be pretty unreasonable for most developers.
What I'm saying is there is a difference between the bleeding edge stuff or things that push boundaries and common practice. And if you are coding against that other stuff, you also need a fallback for if it doesn't work.
There are tons of changes under the hood that made webapps development easier in the past 5 years, and not all of them can be polyfilled. For example, ES6 Proxy is something an end user won't even notice it exist, but now used at fundamental level on many webapps. Developers that depend on it won't trade their productivity gain from using the new api with supporting browsers that has less than 1% marketshare.
Oh my no. There's the plethora of Web APIs to attend to, with ever new things that require support in order for websites to work. And each of those creates complex security concerns. The js spec is ever moving, with new syntax and features. Accessibility concerns interact with all of these other parts. It's "normal" to ship complex desktop apps deployed to the browser now. And THEN, after all that, you need to maintain backwards compatibility with old standards.
You basically need to handle an operating system where the VM is built on top of your browser, with all the security responsibilities and changing demands of developers working on your platform therein.
People who ship desktop apps as a web browser are already doing that with chromium built in. As far as I can tell a typical user reading the normal web isn't going to be locked out of it with a browser that's a few years old. Not everyone writing web content is an activist trying to disrupt desktop apps.
Presumably because doing anything else is just impossible in this day and age.
There are only two-and-a-half actively-maintained rendering engines in existence: Gecko, and Chromium/Webkit. There's a reason for that. A single person isn't going to be able to maintain their own.
The problem is that, the web isn't really an open standard if there's only one implementation of the standard. The standard just becomes "whatever works in Chromium".
It also gives Google the power to unilaterally add or remove anything from the standard as they think will benefit Google. Sure, Microsoft or Brave could choose not to go along with the change, but Microsoft doesn't want to spend resources maintaining a fork, so they're much more likely go go along with whatever Google does.
I think the main problem is that the DOM and javascript are just too large for one person / small team to maintain, so you get feature lag. I'm hoping webassembly and canvas are a small enough target to overcome this, but if we were to look at what could have been, Scheme and something like Tk would've been better
And this is a developer who also maintains iOS/iPadOS versions along with the Mac version, so not using Webkit on Mac would mean having to maintain and develop for two rendering engines since Apple mobile OSes require using Webkit.
It absolutely is and I actually debated which term I should use in my post. Everyone seems to have settled on using "Chromium" to describe browsers based on Google's engine, and I want to use the word that the most people will be familiar with.
I think Adblock is a feature that disproves that hypothesis. If google continues to neuter ad blocking as they have with the changes to plugin architecture then it will open itself up to competition.
Things outside the web rendering engine also prevent more widespread adoption of alternative browsers as well. Google's WildVine DRM is an example. That doesn't ship with chromium.
Blink is a WebKit fork, so I could see a reasonable person clumping them together when complaining about monoculture. I suppose it really depends on the degree to which they've diverged; I personally suspect that being led by Google vs Apple does actually make a difference, especially around privacy and anti-tracking issues.
Is it really possible for a single developer to maintain feature parity with Chrome and Firefox (or even webkit)? If you're a single developer maintaining your own browser, you must choose between maintaining your own incomplete engine that lacks many html5 features the users want, or adopt blink/webkit/gecko and instantly gain feature parity with mainstream browsers.
I think modern browsers could be a baseline for network based OS in couple of years to come. It is really complex and has zillion features that not many developers know exactly know
Networking is already first class on most operating systems worth naming, even the ones without a good browser.
A modern browser as a basis for the Shell/userland of an operating system is essentially Chrome OS with a difference in user experience that’s about as different as the set of features from browser to browser. A lean userland might be desirable, but even operating systems with lean out of the box userlands usually have a package manger that can quickly expand the base of software available to you on the system.
And speaking of package managers, the stuff going on with Nix and Guix is a lot more interesting than reinventions of Chrome OS. Check them out, the system can be about as lean or thick as you like depending on how you configure it.
Or offered free internet while showing a banner below.
Or those spin wheel / lotto websites where you would get a limited amount of plays daily but would win real money. Then they send you a real 4 dollar check/cheque.
I wonder what happened to company behind the punch the monkey banner.
Those were the days people thought we would all be working and living through the internet (perhaps in second life style) soon and buying everything. Ironicly 20 years later we are being forced to life this way.
It was my first “freelance” project; I didn’t even expect him to pay, I just liked his browser and wanted to feel like a grown man (was 14 at the time). But he insisted he’ll pay me; it was the first money I ever made. Ah, good memories. If the author sees this: Good luck!