iCab to the Rescue

I was using my iBook G3 for the first time for a while at the weekend. One of the things I noticed (apart from Dropbox's little RAM sucker) was that TenFourFox seems to grab as much RAM as it can. This makes sense, but does it allow the little Mac to do anything else while browsing? Admittedly, browsing tends to grab the processor too (I use Activity Monitor a lot on the iBook), but does it really need all the RAM?

I poked around online. TenFourFox is probably the only browser being maintained for PowerPC Macs. Camino, Safari and a bunch of others are all either not supported or the websites have just vanished as project developers lose interest or move onto other things. However, an article on LowEndMac pointed me at iCab, a browser I'd seen before but never really stuck with.

iCab has been around for a while. It now has an iPhone version, so that's worth a look. But meanwhile, it seemed to run nicely on the iBook. It's quick to load and sites display quite quickly. I tried a few simple sites, like LowEndmac and Longform. All successful. Then I tried The Guardian. If anything's going to make it crash, I thought, the Guardian's massive homepage should kill it. But no. iCab took its time, but it loaded. And 25% of my 640MB of RAM was still showing as free, so I loaded TextEdit (Activity Monitor was obviously running as well) to make a few notes. This reminded me that TextEdit's never beeen my favourite, so as iCab seemed happy enough, I downloaded TextWrangler and looked to see if Notational Velocity was still going. It was, but the download link is broken at present. iCab purred along on the inside lane of the information superhighway (as we called it back in the mid 90s).

I was surprised. It was usable. I wouldn't open ten tabs and load six or seven heavy sites. But I could use it.

The iBook still surprises me. It's an occasional machine, for sure, but it's still fun to use and a pleasure to write with.

Speaking of surprising, my iMac is ten years old this year and it's still in weekly use as my main desktop. But that's another story.