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Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Anyone else having this problem?

It just crashes to home screen constantly. It's getting really annoying now.

Shame because it was the best browser by far, but with the jerky scrolling and crashes it's virtually unusable now.

I don't know who to blame iCab or Apple??
 

Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Have you tried completely removing the app and reinstalling?

I just spoke to the dev. He said the puny ram in the ipad1 is to blame. This thing is just over a year old and it's kicking the bucket already. I paid £400 for this thing.

Shame on Apple. They always cripple stuff they release.

I'm jumping ship to android when a tegra 3 powered samsung tab is released.
 

Ashwood11

macrumors 65816
Nov 10, 2010
1,153
0
US
Anyone else having this problem?

It just crashes to home screen constantly. It's getting really annoying now.

Shame because it was the best browser by far, but with the jerky scrolling and crashes it's virtually unusable now.

I don't know who to blame iCab or Apple??

Have you tried simply double clicking the home button and closing all of the Apps on the multi-tasking bar before running iCab? This will free up all of the memory for use by iCab.
 

Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Have you tried simply double clicking the home button and closing all of the Apps on the multi-tasking bar before running iCab? This will free up all of the memory for use by iCab.

Hi.

Yes I try to do that sometimes. I will try to be more diligent in closing unused apps from now on.

Emmeff- I will enjoy my android don't worry. Roll on new year for the tegra 3 Tab :D:D
 

JulianL

macrumors 68000
Feb 2, 2010
1,656
653
London, UK
Have you tried simply double clicking the home button and closing all of the Apps on the multi-tasking bar before running iCab? This will free up all of the memory for use by iCab.
Also try double clicking the home button (when not running iCab) and closing iCab so that you force a cold start rather than a resume when you next start it up. Sometimes when I get iCab in a bad mood and it goes crash crash crash in the same session I find that doing this stops it continually crashing although it is only a matter of time, usually a few days, before it will crash again on me.

I don't know what it is, maybe just me getting used to it and getting over the initial "wow" factor (which took a while since I bought it on UK launch day last year) but I'm finding the limitations of my iPad 1 when web browsing more and more frustrating now. I'm noticing how much slower web browsing is vs my 18 month old PC and the crashes due to lack of memory are becoming annoying. I'm holding out for iOS 5 though to see how close Safari gets to iCab in terms of functionality, that might keep me going until iPad 3 rather than getting an iPad 2 at a point where it is probably over half way to the next hardware update.

- Julian
 

yegon

macrumors 68040
Oct 20, 2007
3,403
1,979
For lengthy browsing sessions and quick navigation between multiple sites you still can't beat a laptop imo. I had a similar experience when I got a launch iPad 1, the first few months I was ALL iPad, but I gravitated back to the macbook pro eventually when I'm at home.

However, the iPad is awesome for on the go, Reeder and Instapaper type reading though, wouldn't want to live with out it.

Re: iCab, I've had very few crashes.
 

Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Yes you are both right.

The iPad 1 browsing experience leaves a lot to be desired compared to a bog standard laptop. If I need to do a serious browsing session I fire up my laptop as well. The laptop is at least 3x faster at rendering pages, they just pop up instantly. The iPad is sooo slow in comparison.

Personally I think it's the safari engine that is the problem. I had an old htc hd2 mobile phone running an android build and the browsing on that was a lot faster than my iPad.

It looks like that ios5 might address this issue by speeding up safari considerably.

I really hope that is the case.

JulianL - I always close iCab from the task bar after a crash and the crashes continue. It's just a memory issue unfortunately.
 

r0k

macrumors 68040
Mar 3, 2008
3,611
75
Detroit
I have crashes with atomic browser. I have it on my iPad 1 and on my iPhone 4. It seems to crash on both. I haven't tried iCab just yet. I don't normally bother with Safari as I want tabbed browsing. I would consider an Android tablet only if I absolutely needed capability Apple has disabled. I'd rather go Android than jailbreak.

But from what I've seen when I play with the galaxy tabs and other Android tablets in the stores, I've got a far superior tablet experience with my iPad 1. I don't know what the Tegra 3 would be like. One important difference is there are over 100,000 iPad apps. Android has over 200,000 apps but they are designed for small screens and I don't know how well they would work on a tablet. I think the Android competition will keep Apple honest and they will begin offering concessions like a way to share files between apps without creating 8 copies of files for 8 apps (besides photos). I don't expect Apple to budge on flash just yet but I wouldn't rule it out in the long run. I also expect the mail client to get better. It's not very competitive right now and lacks basic features like "reply as" and "mark all as read." But the bottom line is if Apple doesn't address browser crashing and Android becomes more stable, people will begin to defect. I just don't believe that the browsing experience on Android is any more stable... yet.

One thing I do is I keep "spare" browsers lying around on my iPad. If I have something unstable, I use a spare browser so it doesn't kill all the tabs in my "good" browser. There are so many low cost and free browsers you can afford a few spare browsers for those pages that have been sending iCab over the edge. Also with iOS' minimalist approach to multitasking, you could have several browsers sitting in background and they would use up less resources than keeping that same content in tabs in only one browser.
 

Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Its nothing to do with certain websites, its just too many tabs are open and it runs out of memory and crashes. Any way I've gone back to safari, I promised myself I never would, but I have for now. I've figured ios5 should be here next month and with it tabbed browsing for Safari! I wonder if that will crash too???

Anyway come March next year I'm going to see what the iPad 3 brings to the table. Sure 100,000 apps are nice but 90% of my iPad use is web browsing. I have a few pages of apps on my iPad but I hardly ever use any of them, I mainly download them out of curiosity, use them for a few days then never go back to them.

To me web browsing should be the bread and butter of any tablet and for me the iPad 1 at the moment is sadly lacking in that department. I'm not talking about flash, I can live without flash, I'm just talking about the speed of pages loading/rendering.

Come March next year my hard earned cash will go on the tablet that gives me the best browsing experience. It may be the iPad 3 or it may be the Tegra 3 powered Tab who knows, but judging by the performance of Safari at the moment, it could very well go the Tab.
 

JulianL

macrumors 68000
Feb 2, 2010
1,656
653
London, UK
Its nothing to do with certain websites, its just too many tabs are open and it runs out of memory and crashes. Any way I've gone back to safari, I promised myself I never would, but I have for now. I've figured ios5 should be here next month and with it tabbed browsing for Safari! I wonder if that will crash too???
I'd be interested to hear how you get on but my suspicion is that it won't crash because I believe that Safari takes a more aggressive approach than iCab's default approach when it comes to memory management. Safari is quite quick to release memory from other (not the currently selected) tab so that it doesn't run out of memory and crash. The penalty for the more aggressive memory management is that it reloads tabs far more frequently when switching which is one big reasons that I use iCab. (In discussing Safari tabs I use the term "tab" very loosely of course - I refer to the fact that Safari can have multiple pages open and a user can switch between them using the thumbnail picker.)

If you want to stay with the iCab UI that you (presumeably) like then there is one option I forgot about, and that is to try changing the iCab "Low Memory Conditions" settings. Note that these settings are only shown in the iCab section of the Apple "Settings" app (they're the bottom two settings on the page), they are not in iCab's built in settings screen (because iCab needs a restart for them to take effect). The lease aggressive thing to try is to set "Show Warnings" to "On", this will give a coloured bar at the bottom of the screen when iCab gets low on memory and I think you get a "yellow alert" before a "red alert" so you could manually close some tabs when you see warnings (it's been a while since I ran with this setting on so I'm not 100% sure the yellow alert is still implemented). More aggressive would be to switch "Free Tabs" to "Always" which I suspect will get you Safari behaviour, i.e. constant reloads when switching tabs but fewer or no crashes, but you do get to keep iCab's "proper" tab UI.

Roll on iOS 5 and Safari, we also get the benefit of Apple's speedups in WebKit with that as well. I feel bad for the iCab developer but right now I really am looking for more speed from my browsing experience and I'm hoping that iOS 5 will give me this.

- Julian
 

Lockon

macrumors regular
Jun 7, 2010
132
14
Why not swap over to Mercury Browser? It doesn't crash nearly as much as iCab or Atomic on the iPad 1. It has all of the same features as the other two, plus it has Firefox Sync.

Now, Mercury does seem a little slower on its rendering than Atomic, but I will take that over crashes and constant tab reloading.
 

Wozza2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2010
102
0
Cheers for the suggestions.

I've just tried mercury free and ichromy and guess what - no jerky scrolling. How can they get away with that? iCab has terrible jerky scrolling because Apple forbade them to use a private call within the OS that fixes jerky scrolling.

I'm wondering why iCab got pulled up and some other browsers didn't. Unless they just haven't got round to dealing with the other browsers.

Anyway both browsers are decent. I like the Firefox sync in Mercury, but I prefer the look of iChromy. But at the end of the day I think I'm going to wait for Safari iOS 5 and stick with that.
 
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