iCab Mobile

Proof that tabbed browsing on the iPad is more than possible, iCab really does make the browsing experience better on the iPad. First, the bad news:

• Too many buttons and options.
• That “pull down to refresh” crap that Twitter inspired is a bad idea - webpages don’t refresh as smoothly as new tweets. You’ll quickly learn to tap the status bar to get to the top of the page.
• Being a third-party app it has to deal with not getting the advantages that Mobile Safari has, like not having that fancy new Javascript engine. I would have thought that it would have had a harder time when in the background compared to Safari, though, and I haven’t seen evidence of that in practice.

Now, the good news:

• Tabbed browsing is as easy to use, if not easier, on the iPad compared to Safari the Mac. It’s superior to iPad Safari’s Pages because it takes half the taps, your tab count is immediately obvious, and switching is instantaneous.
• Built in plugin support - send the page to Instapaper in two easy taps, for instance, or load the Google Cache version of a fireballed page when necessary.
• Full screen browsing that works nicely.
• Download files to Dropbox.

It needs some refinement, but I think this will become my go-to iPad browser. Despite the plethora of options, it still comes across as being tastefully designed - a tricky balancing act that not many apps can pull off.

If you have an iPad, I recommend you give this a shot. If you have an iPhone… well, judge for yourself.