When iCab is launched, iCab can open an empty window, a window with the homepage or no browser window at all.
In case another applications want to open a web page in iCab, iCab can open this page in a new window, a new tab or in the currently active window/tab. In the latter case the currently displayed web page would be overwritten by the new web page.
You can also choose a color scheme for the browser toolbar buttons.
By default the shortcut Cmd-W closes a window. But when multiple Tabs are present in a window, it's usually not intended to close the whole window. Usually the user only wants to close a Tab. So you can configure if Cmd-W closes the whole window or only the active Tab. If Cmd-W closes the Tab only, you can use Cmd-Shift-W to close the whole window.
If a window only contains one single document, iCab can hide the Tab toolbar to save space on the screen. The Tabs toolbar will be automatically displayed when another Tab is created.
Clicking a link on a web site will usually open the new web page in the same window or Tab, replacing the old web page. When holding down the Shift, Option and/or command key while clicking links you can open them in new windows or Tabs in the background or in the foreground. Which keyboard shortcuts will have which effect depends on some of the Tabs settings. In the Tabs preferences panel the keyboard shortcuts are shown, which are valid with the current settings.
Many of the menu items can be used for more then one element at the same time (for example for the web page itself, the link that was hit and the image that is the link). To avoid that the menu gets too large and overloaded it's possible to group most of the menu items in submenus where each submenu will address a certain element type (like images, links, pages and frames).
The Page Overview provides a list of all headings of the web page which can be directly accessed through the contextual menu. Also all links of the web page can be listed in the contextual menu. This can be sometimes useful to find "hidden" links.
Enabling the E-Mail features you can open the email application from within iCab and you can send the URL of the current web page via Email to someone else.
The "Prefetch" feature can be used to load certain links of a web page in the background while the web page is displayed. This can be useful on certain "News" sites when you only have a slow internet connection and you want to read most of the linked articles. While reading one article, others can be loaded in the background so when you later go to the next, you don't have to wait until it is loaded. But this feature requires that the web page tells the browser which links are safe to be "prefetched". Only few web pages are doing this.
The Session Feature can be used to save the current session (the current windows and Tabs, their content and their location on the screen) into a file or to load such a session file again and restore the browser state to the saved state at any time.
The Automatic Update feature is meant for web developers. When loading a local file in iCab with the automatic update feature enabled, iCab will automatically update its browser window whenever the file has changed. So you can use iCab as a "live preview" for an HTML document that is currently edited in another application like an editor.
The Speak Text feature can be used to let iCab read web pages aloud. This works fine with English texts, for non-English texts the default voices of the MacOS won't work that great.
When the option "Allow launching applications" is enabled you can browse through the folders of your hard disk and launch applications with a simple mouse click from within iCab. If this option is unchecked, you can't launch iCab from within iCab.
When the option "open local files in external applications" is checked, iCab will try to find a suitable application for all the files iCab can't display itself, to open the files in these external applications.
iCab can be configured to need a confirmation to do certain actions, like quitting while windows are open, or opening more than a certain number of pages at the same time.
de;q=0.9,en;q=0.5,*
" means you prefer German (de) with the priority value or 0.9 over English (en) with a priority value of 0.5. The priority value can have a value between 0.0 and 1.0).
A web page can use different fonts for different font families. In this panel you can configure which fonts to use for which font family. You can also select font sizes for the standard font and the fixed with fonts, as well as the minimum font size. If a web page tries to use a smaller font size than the minimum font size, the text is displayed with the minimum font size. The minimum font size setting can be used to make sure that the text is always large enough so you can read it.
iCab can check if the web pages which are saved as bookmarks have changed or are updated on the server. Each bookmark has its own private setting for this checks. In the Bookmarks preferences you can configure the default settings for the checks for all newly created bookmarks (in the bookmarks window you can modify these settings for each bookmark again). The checks can be started manually through the Bookmarks menu or automatically based on certain time periods. Manual checks will only check bookmarks which are allowed to be checked, so if you don't want a bookmark to be checked at all, select the option Don't check. After a bookmark is checked, the result of this check is displayed in an icon. You can configure how long this icon will show the check result (this makes sense because you usually don't want to have a bookmarks flagged as "changed" for a longer time).
You can configure iCab to ignore all of the colors the web page wants to use and use your own color definitions instead.
You can do the same for the fonts: allow the web page to choose the fonts or always use the fonts you've selected.
If you enable the language-specific quotes then iCab will use the quote characters that are normally used in the language of the text.
The option "Use Tab key to navigator between links" can be used to use the Tab key to navigate not only between text field but also between links so you can navigate within and between web pages using the keyboard.
Some web pages do allow to activate links or form element via keyboard shortcuts but they do not display these shortcuts in any way. The option "Show Accesskey shortcuts" makes these shortcuts visible in the web page, so you'll see which keyboard shortcut will work for which page element.
Configuring a user-defined JavaScript code, you can even modify the structure and content of each web page that is loaded in iCab. This is a very powerful feature, but you'll need some knowledge about HTML and JavaScript.
The option "Scale images to window width" affects only image files which are directly loaded in the browser window (images which are not embedded in a web page). When enabled, images that are larger than the window will be scaled down so they will be completely visible in the window.
In this panel you can also configure iCab to log all the HTTP headers which are sent by iCab to the servers and which are sent from the servers to iCab. This feature can be used to analyze the communication between iCab and web servers.
You can change this setting in the View menu as well, which is much faster than opening the preferences dialog.
So there must be some way to protect the user from such "dangerous" domain names. But it's not easy to decide if a domain name is dangerous, because the usage of a cyrillic "a" which is dangerous in "apple.com" is not dangerous at all when used in another really cyrillic domain name.
iCab therefore offers several options to configure the usage of IDNs. You can switch off the support for IDNs completely. iCab will still be able to open the web pages which do use these IDNs, but the domain names will be only displayed in their ASCII-equivalent domain name, which looks very "cryptic". This way a false domain name like "apple.com" with a cyrillic "a" can't be mixed up with the real apple.com domain anymore, the false domain will no longer displayed as "apple.com". When configuring iCab to show all IDNs then all domain names will be shown even if they are dangerous (like "apple.com" with a cyrillic "a"). This setting should be avoided, because there's a security risk to mix up domain names. iCab also provides a list where you can enter the domain names which you trust and where you know that they are safe. iCab can be configured to show the IDNs which are in this list and to don't show all the other IDNs. iCab can also identify all the "secure letters" in each language which do not look similar to other letters from other languages. And as long as only these secure letters are used in IDNs, iCab would be able to display these IDNs without security risk.
You can open the Keychain application of the MacOS from within the security panel. The Keychain application is used to store all the server certificates for secure web pages.
Each search engine entry in the list has a name, a key (optional. It is used to address the search engine from within the URL field), an URL, POST data and the text encoding. The URL, POST data and the encoding information are very sensible data, and when editing these you have to make sure that everything is correct and everything is exactly as the search engine expects this data. If the search engine uses the HTTP GET method to start the search, the POST field must be empty. If the search engine uses HTTP POST, the URL and the POST field must be filled out. In any case the parameter for the search request must be the very last parameter in the URL (when using GET) or the POST field (when using POST). If the encoding field is empty, iCab assumes that the UTF-8 encoding have to be used to encode the search request.
In general it is not recommended to edit more that the name and the key fields in this preferences panel. If you want to add a new search engine, it is recommended to do this in the following way (then iCab will collect all the needed data for the GET, POST and encoding fields itself, the user has not to do this himself): Open the web page with the search engine you want to add in a browser window. Now control-click (right-click) somewhere within the search form (usually it's the best to hit the "submit" button of the form) to open the contextual menu and here select the menu item Add Form to Search field. Then iCab will collect all the data for this form so that it can be added to the internet search engine list. The data is displayed in a dialog box, here you'll usually only need to define a key letter to use the search engine from within the URL field.
The option Load files from best source will load web pages from the web cache or the internet, depending of the "modified" status that the server provides for this page. This is usually the best setting.
The option Always load files from the Web can be used to force loading all web pages from the web, even if they are still available in the Web cache. This can be useful on web pages which change very often, but where the server "forgets" to tell the browser that the page has updated. So the Browser might load a cached version of the page though the page on the server has updated and has already another content.
The option Always load files from the cache will load the web pages from the cache even if the server has already updated the page. Only if the page is not yet in the cache, the page is loaded from the internet.
iCab can be configured to clear the caches when quitting. But the caches can be also cleared manually.
It's also possible to exclude certain URL schemes from the URL suggestion list. This makes sense for certain URL schemes like "ftp" which is usually only used for downloads and you probably don't want to start the same download again from within the URL field.
In case you're entering only a single word in the URL field, iCab can automatically treat this as domain name and add the missing parts. For example when you enter "apple", iCab can automatically add the missing parts so it will open "www.apple.com". In case you prefer the top level domain "de" instead of "com" you can also configure iCab so that it would open "www.apple.de".