iCab Mobile Web Browser for iOS

Toying around with third-party web browsers is something the 10-years-ago version of me would’ve enjoyed and cared about, but today me? Nah. I’m mostly fine with the default Safari.

…That is, except for one thing. All I wanted to do was grab my App Store purchase data from Apple so I could import it into AppRaven. Sounds simple, right? But no, Apple — the company who created the iPhone and iPad that are my only two computing devices, along with the Files app itself — seems to think that downloading .zip files on mobile is some kind of impossibility:

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So what did I do? I turned to iCab Mobile, a web browser for iOS that lets you change your user agent (or “Browser ID”) to just about anything you want: Firefox 50/75/107 for Mac or Windows, Internet Explorer 6/8/9/10/11, Opera 88/Mini, Chrome 74/103 for Mac/Windows/Linux, etc. Heck, you can even pretend you’re browsing from a PlayStation 3 if you want.

With iCab Mobile set to appear to Apple’s servers as Firefox, I got the files I wanted, no problem. And why they think mobile Safari isn’t capable of this? I’ll never know.

So yeah, that’s my whole sales pitch for iCab Mobile. Easiest $3 I ever spent, because it saved me a trip to a local library to use one of their computers. And if you do happen to care about a bunch of nerdy configurable stuff in your web browser, there’s plenty of that to be found as well:

icab-mobile-web-browser-for-ios-config-screenshots