I emailed the developer and here's what I wrote and his response,
I haven't tried any of this yet as I just got a response yesterday:

"Hi, Like the title says iCab is my "go to" browser on my iPad and
iPhone, love it! In the last week or so I've been getting multiple
crashes per day and can't figure out why.

His response:

Especially on an iPad of the 1st generation in combination with iOS 4.3,
the number of crashes are in general much higher than before. This
seems to be caused by either a bug in the WebKit component of the iOS
or the iOS 4.3 needs more main memory for itself in general. And because
the iPad has not enough main memory in the first place, it is running
out of memory even faster with the iOS 4.3. But in the developer forums
these crashes are discussed as well and it is not clear if this is really
memory related or just a bug of the new iOS 4.3.

But you can configure what iCab should do in low memory conditions
in the "Settings" App of the device (the settings App can be found on the
homescreen). If you configure iCab to release inactive Tabs in all
low memory conditions, you can probably avoid many of these crashes.

Another thing you could try is to reboot the device. Hold down the Sleep
button at the top of the case until a slider appears on screen to switch
of the device, use the slider and when the device has shut down, hold down
the sleep button again to switch the device on again. This can often
help as well, if the device is running for months.

--
Alexander Clauss

---

Grateful11

Yes, and I also get a lot of crashes in Atomic Lite.

I just downloaded iCab for my iPhone a few days ago and haven't seen any crashes.

Is it just an iPad 1 issue?

---

Bryan
______________________________________________________
Mac Mini 2.6 GHz, 16 GB ram Big Sur
MacBook Pro (Early 2008 model) 2.4 GHz, 4 GB ram, 200 GB hard drive/ Mac OS 10.9.1
iPhone XR
Location: Cincinnati

I'm still on 3.1.2 iPhone3G and been using iCab for ages with no crashes ever. Nice clean app.

Like I said I love the browser, it's more like a reg. browser than anything I've seen for mobile devices. One
touch of an icon and you have full screen, no address bar, tabs, etc. I just wish it hadn't suddenly started
crashing so much, I hate to do a reinstall just to see if that would help and lose my bookmarks there's no
import/export function that I know of. He once told me via email how I might be able to import my bookmarks
from Safari but I couldn't figure it out.

---

Grateful11

Does the iPhone backup made by iTunes save your third part application data?

I listed the 256MB RAM as a con for the iPad and some people mocked me. NIce to see that iOS developers understand what I was referring to and why the low amount of RAM can be a problem. If this issue is not an iOS 4.3 bug, but an increased amount of system RAM being used "feature", the performance of the first gen iPad will continue to get worse.

My second generation iPod touch fell apart with the iOS 4 update. Apple slowly patched things back together with successive updates (partly by stripping out functionality, but at least my iPod touch works again), but then stopped updating this revision of touch altogether.

Bummer about the crashes on iPad. I'm using it on iPhone 4 with 4.0.1 and no crashes. Its so much better than safari its crazy. With "Browser Changer" from Cydia you can assign it as your default browser. There's also a "free memory" function in SBSettings that might help with low memory crashes without rebooting.

I'm having the same problem with iCab. When I pinch to zoom on "heavy" sites the app just collapses no matter if I only have one tab active. I wrote the dev about this and I received a response very similar to yours, I tried his workarounds but none of them worked for me. I know iPad 1 lacks RAM but with Safari I get smooth web surfing all the time without crashes. I haven't written back to the dev, I don't know if it'd be worthy. I would've liked to install a demo first before I bought the full app, if it really cannot function properly on the iPad 1, it shouldn't be listed on the appstore as compatible.

[iPad 1: iOS 4.3.3]