iCab 3.0.5 and OS 9.22 Problems

[unknown1]

iCab 3.0.5 and OS 9.22 Problems
I have finally come back to the Mac fold two and a
half years after my PowerBook 3400 hard drive crashed.

I now have a 400MHz Pismo G3 running OS 9.2.2.
Theoretically three to four times faster than the 3400
with the 604 (I think) processor. I got it broken off
eBay for $46, put some parts into it and it works!

My problem is I use the internet mostly and I have
become accustomed to Firefox on Windows XP on a 450 MHz
Pentium II.

iCab is dog slow, crashes frequently, locks up on
javascript and has a severe memory leak somewhere.

What I do:

I only run javascript where necessary (like yahoo mail
and most banking sites) as it locks up for about two
minutes before giving me the 'javascript is in a loop'
message. The problem is it locks up the entire
computer for those two minutes. I realize this is
partly an OS 9 problem but it us really frustrating,
no other software I use does this.

I have to check memory usage with the 'About This
Computer' window every few minutes as iCab grabs
memory continually. I usually save everything and
restart iCab about every 10 to 15 minutes as it starts
to take over 100MB by then and things get unstable.

I have opened iCab with one or two tabs and gone to
'About This Computer' and just watched as iCab started
with 30MB and gradually increased usage to over 70MB
in just a few minutes while making no changes to the
pages being viewed!

Today I tried going to <http://www.capitalone.com> to
check our credit balance (with only one tab open) and
it just slowed to a crawl. I checked and iCab had
consumed 329 of my 384 Megs of RAM! So I restarted
iCab, did the same thing again and watched memory
usage increase quickly to 250Megs before just closing
the page and moving back to the PC and Firefox. I
realize it is likely a problem with the webpage coding
(has anyone ever seen iCab smile?), but Firefox
handles it just fine.

Any suggestions as to setup or memory (I have virtual
memory turned on) or something I can do to get this to
work?

I plan on installing OS X but I only have 10.0 and a
10.1 upgrade right now (I have been warned about their
instability and incompatibility with a lot of software
so am not looking forward to the changeover). I
probably can't come up with 10.3 for a couple of
months.

Is iCab 3 or 4 on OS X any better? I remember the
switch from 2.98Beta to 3.0Beta on my 3400 was good in
page rendering but impossibly slow to use on 180MHz so
I went back to 2.98 till the famous hard drive crash
of July 2005.

[Turboladdade]

iCab is really awful. I would stick with Netscape 7, or Opera 6, for Mac OS 9 browsing.

Mac OS X is dominated by Safari and Firefox, and to a lesser extent Camino. iCab isn't a real player there.

Out of curiosity, why is your post not wrapped to the entire width of the page? Did you manually enter all those carriage returns? Did iCab do that to your post?

[unknown1]

I actually submitted this first to the iCab yahoo group and yahoo email did the formating. I got a pretty good answer from Mac-Forums.com: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showth ... post605821

WamCom looks pretty good to me and I already downloaded it sometime ago but have been using iCab because it is supposed to be so good.

Never got a response from the iCab group. I really wish iCab would go open source, I think it would improve much quicker than it is...

[Turboladdade]

I found WamCom to be unbearably slow, even on G3s. I would definitely give Netscape 7.02 a try. I've tried every Mac OS 9 browser and always go back to Netscape.