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Sun, Dec 09, 2007
iCab 4.0.0 Beta 14 (and 3.0.3 Beta 465)
On Tuesday, Alexander released two new iCab beta versions (available for registered users only). The first one is iCab 3.0.3 Beta 465 and it fixes a small security problem (security checks were too strict; https pages are now allowed to access http pages from the same domain).
The second one is the very first semi-public version of iCab 4.0 (Beta 14). Yes, believe your eyes, a complete rewrite of iCab is in the works! iCab 4.0 is a Cocoa application, and it uses Apple's/Safari's WebKit instead of iCab 3's own rendering engine and JavaScript implementation (i.e. InScript will be history soon).
iCab 4 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, although Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 is recommended. Here is what Alexander has to say about the new version:
iCab 4 is completely rewritten using the Cocoa API of MacOSX (iCab 3 is using the older Carbon API). The whole user interface of iCab can now fully use all the MacOSX features which are only available in Cocoa. So iCab 4 should look much better in MacOSX than before. Dialog boxes and windows are cleaned up, so some old settings which don't make much sense anymore are removed, some settings are modified and some new features are added.
Because of all the changes, iCab 4 doesn't read the old preferences from iCab 3 anymore and also the old filter manager configurations are no longer supported (the new filter manager has changed too much). But iCab will read the old Hotlist file, read and write WebArchives, read the old session files, so all the important data should be automatically imported from the old iCab 3.
More information about what has changed and what has been enhanced can be found in the archive's readme file.