iCab Preferences

A first attempt at a guide to iCab Preferences can be found at http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/icabpref.htm. The first part of it is reproduced below, and more will be added in due course. At the moment it is incomplete, and some of the entries are little more than guesses, so input and criticism from others is definitely needed.

Preferences Window

Operation

Prefs Change Immediately Any change you make takes effect immediately. You don"t have to quit and relaunch iCab. There"s one exception: if you change a preference related to downloading behaviour during a file download, the changes won"t be implemented for the download(s) in progress.

-- JesseTheK - 09 Oct 2001

Browser

Screenshot

Navigation toolbar. By selecting "Text & icons", "Text" or "Icons", you can make the toolbar display both text and icons, text only or icons only, repectively. Selecting "None" hides the toolbar. Checking "Large icons" makes the icons in the toolbar bigger (useful for large screens). In the list below, you can check the buttons you want to see in the toolbar. More info about toolbars is available here.

Other toolbars. Checking "Standard Links", "Favorites" or "Location" will show in a browser window the corresponding toolbar. More info about toolbars is available here.

Delete objects. You can select "Always ask" or "Ask when more than one object" to make iCab confirm the deletion when you delete an object (or more than one object). For example, if "Always ask" is selected and you try to delete an entry in the hotlist, iCab will ask "Do you want to remove the selected item(s)?". Clicking OK will delete the item(s), "Cancel" will cancel the operation. iCab will never confirm deletions if you select "Never ask".

Miscellaneous. Checking "Live scolling" will make all iCab windows scroll as you move a scroll bar. When unchecked, the window will scroll only when you release the mouse after moving the scroll bar. Live scrolling is not recommended if your computer is not fast enough. Checking "Use Navigation Services" will make iCab use the Navigation Services, usually available on Mac OS 8.5 and up, for opening, saving and selecting files and folders. Navigation Services is slower and takes more memory than the standard windows, but has more features. Checking "Confirm Quit" will make iCab ask you "Do you really want to quit iCab?" each time you want to Quit iCab. Useful if you have the habit to press Command-Q at random intervals...

Contextual Menus

Open with... How quickly do you want a pop-up menu to pop up? If you tick Mac OS Standard (Control-click) it will pop up only when you hold the Control key down while clicking with the mouse. If you tick Automatically open after... if will still respond immediately to a Control-click, but it will also pop up if you hold the mouse button down for as many tenths of a second as you enter in the box. I have it set at 8/10 second.

Submenus in contextual menu. The pop-up Contextual menu can in principle contain up to eight submenus, and you can tick any one that you want to see if it is available. However, it will be rare for all eight to be available for any one page: for example, if the page has no background image (this one doesn"t) the Background image submenu will not be available regardless of how you set it in the preferences. The Page submenu will normally always be available, but if you never want to use it you can suppress it by unticking the first preference. Taking them in order, Page refers to actions you can take with the whole page (save it as a file, examine the source, read it out loud, validate the HTML, and several others); Frame relates to the same things for the particular frame you are in; Link refers to the Link submenu that appears if the pop-up menu is evoked while the mouse is over a link; Image refers to the Image submenu that appears if the pop-up menu is evoked while the mouse is over an image; Background image refers to the submenu that appears in the pop-up menu if the page contains a background image; Java refers to the submenu that appears in the pop-up menu if the page contains any Java; Overview refers to the submenu that provides an overview of the page based on the <h1>, <h2>, <h tags in the page; All links refers to the submenu that provides a list of all the links defined by <a href= ...> tags in the page.

Menu entries in contextual menu. This is a list of all the items that may appear in the Contextual menu. Tick all the ones you think you may need. Speak, Save, Find, Print, Reload, Download and Forward/back should all be self-evident. Check syntax allows you to send the URL to the W3C? validator to check the HTML for errors (as an alternative to the built-in check that iCab provides automatically with its smiling (or, more usually, though not I hope on this page, scowling) face. It also allows some validating with BBEdit (it won"t work with BBEdit Lite). More info at Bare Bones Software"s Web Site. The next group, Open in new window, Add URL to Hotlist, Copy URL to Clipboard, Use page as home page/search site, Show source should again all be self-evident. The last one, InScript filter, allows you to decide whether Javascript etc. will be allowed on the page in question (or ones on the same site).

Windows / Launch

"New window" opens... This decides what happens when you select New window in the File menu. Choose between Empty window and Window with home page. Decide also whether you want the new window to appear over the one you are looking at or not. Tick Stack if that"s what you want. On my computer iCab seems to ignore this setting: it puts the new window over the old one regardless of whether this option is ticked or not.

Events. Tick GetURL event opens a new window if you want URLs accessed by AppleEvents (the sort of Events that AppleScript sends) to be opened in new windows.

At launch. Tick Open Hotlist and/or Open History if you want your bookmark list and/or your history to open automatically when you launch iCab. Tick Always start in offline mode if you commonly begin an iCab session by reviewing files stored on your hard disk and you don"t want iCab to access the web until you say so.

At launch: Browser. Choose Don"t open if you don"t want any windows opened until you say so when you launch iCab, Open empty window if that"s what you want, or Open home page if that is.

At launch: Download manager. Select Don"t open if you only want to see the download manager when you ask for it or when you start a download, Only open when downloads are pending if you want a reminder when there is unfinished business from a previous session, or Always open if you want it to open automatically regardless of whether any downloads are in progress.

Browser

HTML Display

Screenshot

Colours. Select the colours for (unvisited) Links, Visited links and Active links. In each case clicking on the coloured rectangle will bring up a colour circle in which you can click to define the colour you want. You can specify the colours for the Background and the Text. Whatever you set for these colours you can allow the page you are visiting to override them by ticking Use the colours of the page. In the same section you can tick Underline links if you like your links underlined. Ticking Use Mac OS theme makes iCab follow the color theme of Mac OS (Platinum in Mac OS 8-9 and Aqua in Mac OS X).

HTML. Check Sounds (<BGSOUND>) if you trust the web sites you visit to select your background music for you, Blinking text (<BLINK>) if you don"t object to blinking text, Page defines the font if you are willing to let the page decide the font (though bear in mind that most pages are not created on Macintoshes, so you may not have the fonts the page author has selected.), Page sets font size if you trust authors to know better than you do yourself how good your eyesight is, Scrolling text (<MARQUEE>) if you don"t object to text that scrolls all by itself.

Objects. Check Images if you want images to be loaded automatically, Max quality if you want them displayed at the best quality (resolution and colour fidelity) that your computer is capable of, and Background images loaded in pages that contain them. Under Play GIF animations, select Never if you don"t want to see GIF images animated at all, Once if you will allow them to go through one cycle only, and Infinite if you don"t mind if they go on for ever. The default setting is a fourth possibility, Normal, but this seems to be the same as Infinite.

Frames. Check Show frames if you accept frames. Show embedded frames means that additional framesets may be embedded inside a frame. Note: A frameset is a document that contains multiple webpages, each of which is called a frame in this context, typically there is only one frameset at any one time. Always allow resizing: webpage authors have the option of setting some default behaviours for their frame-based sites. One of these is to disallow resizing. This often works out ok, but in some pages this leads to odd scrollbars or the lack thereof. Checking this option in the preferences will instruct iCab to ignore those controls. In practice this means that iCab will add small divider lines between frames. Click and hold those to resize the frame. Always show scroll bar: another way to instruct iCab to ignore the author"s preference. This one will always show a scrollbar in each frame. This is useful because often pages that have been edited on a windows computer have been authored with small font-sizes. As the Macintosh platform uses a slightly different font specification sometimes parts of pages disappear with no visible way of getting there. Checking this option will allow you to always scroll to that area.

Margins. In principle you should be able to set the Size to anything from 0 to 99 pixels; in practice the setting seems to have no immediate effect, but it takes effect for new windows. Check Page may change size if you are willing to allow margin settings within the page to override your settings.

Default pages

Home page. Enter the URL of the page you want to set as a default, either for launching iCab if you have made the appropriate setting above, or as the page you reach when you click on the "Home" icon in the navigation toolbar or select Home page from the Navigate menu.

Search site. Enter the URL of the search engine that you commonly use. This doesn"t prevent you from using other search engines, but it determines what you will get if you click on the "Search" icon in the navigation toolbar or select Search site from the Navigate menu.

Helper page. At the moment official iCab help is available only in German, and can be downloaded from the iCab site. If you find these unofficial help pages useful you could enter their URL http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/icabpref.htm here.

Downloads

Network

Searches

Caches

Java

InScript

Kiosk Mode

Special

iCab Preferences File

Internet Control Panel

iCab Special Features

Hotlist

Kiosk Mode