February 2007

iCab 3.0.3 Beta 441..443 - Tab Previews

During the last few weeks registered iCab users found three new iCab beta versions using iCab's update checker. The Mac OS X versions now have the ability to display the contents of an inactive tab as a kind of tooltip when the mouse cursor hovers over the tab's title (this can be switched off in the preferences under General > Tabs).

And as usual, there are lots of bug fixes and small improvements. Here's the complete list, taken from Alexander's release history:

• Important bugfix which fixes a crash when closing a web page (either by closing a tab or window or by opening a new web page). A certain structure which is created to hold the default value for the default color of the CSS shorthand property "border-bottom" when the color was not given in the CSS code was not initialized properly.
• If in JavaScript code the call "open()" was used instead of "window.open()", which have both a different task, iCab will now check if really "open()" was meant here or if it is likely that "window.open()" was meant. iCab may then interpret the call depending of the context.
• Because of a bug in Apple's XCode iCab could crash in certain circumstances when JavaScript code manipulates the HTML tree an a certain way.
• Added a workaournd for JavaScript code which uses non-breaking space characters instead of normal space characters. In general non-breaking space characters must be treated like normal "letters", but other browsers treat non-breaking spaces in JavaScript code as normal spaces instead. So now, iCab will do this as well.
• Accessing the TBODY elements of a table via JavaScript did also take the TBODY elements of nested tables into account, which is wrong.
• empty stylesheet files (file size of 0 Bytes) did crash iCab
• Fixed an serious bug which could cause the simple javaScript document.write() calls overwrite the document instead of just adding some new text.
• Small correction for CSS selectors ">", "+" and "~" whose first element is missing.
• Small modification for accepting cookies: Even when cookies are generally switched off, cookies which are only valid for the current session can be accepted automatically if this was explicitly configured in the cookie preferences.
• When deleting a button from a certain location in the navigation toolbar, iCab could crash.
• Small optimization for calculating DOMCoreListGetLength (JavaScript). iCab will now use a cache for these values, which speeds up several web pages which do not save the values themselves and instead let calculate these values multiple times by the browser.
• In the Universal Binary version, iCab will add the real DPI value for the screen resolution which is measured by the MacOS into the user defined edit field in the CSS preferences, when resetting to the "Factory settings". This way it is no longer necessary to measure the exact screen resolution (dpi) with a ruler (if the display itself supports this auto detection of the dpi value) in case you don't want to use the predefined default values (which is still the best option in general).
• When importing certificates in ".cer" format, line breaks in DOS format did confuse iCab.
• Importing of certificates didn't work under "native" MacOS 8/9 (it did work fine when running iCab in the "Classic" environment).
• Workaround for a bug in the MacOS added, where icab gets a wrong result when measuring the widths of text lines.
• If a JavaScript onclick handler for INPUT elements tells the browser to prevent the default action of the element, iCab will now ignore this for text fields.
• Workaround added for the XML/HTTP shortcut "/>", which is often used even in HTML where this is wrong. In general this is not a problem, but for a few special HTML tags this can nevertheless cause some problems.
• UTF-16 encoded web pages with Intel-byteorder were not shown correctly on PowerPC Macs.
• Fixed a problem with absolutly positioned tables which were moved to the right using the "right" property of CSS.
• If "frame" pages set a new URL for the top frame via JavaScript and the URL is identical to the current URL of the top frame, the frame won't be reloaded anymore.
• While an alerbox is open that was opened by JavaScript code, loading a new web page will be now delayed until the alert box is closed again.
• Fixed a problem in JavaScript, which caused flickr.com to show error messages even when everything works fine.
• Quirks modus slightly modified for handling uppercase/lowercase letters in ID attributes in "HTML 4 traditional".
• Links which started with "../" were never recognized as "visited".
• Now, also in the PowerPC version for MacOSX the saved forms ("View" > "Save forms"/ "fill out forms") will be saved in the keychain of the MacOS if the keychain is activated in iCab. Until now this was only done in the Universal Binary version.
• very large images with percentage widths inside tables could make the table much larger then expected.

Leopard Tech Talk

On Wednesday I attended Apple's Leopard Tech Talk in Hamburg. Of course, the event was strictly under NDA, so I'm not allowed to talk about any technical details (some of which are already known, anyway).

But the speakers explicitely mentioned that their performance was not nda'ed, so: Good show! I especially liked the topics that delved deeper into technical details (like Objective-C 2.0 and development for 64-bit). And the catering was superb! *mjam*

Looking forward to the next tech talk! Or maybe another Java kitchen? :-) I couldn't attend the last one...

iWoz surfing with iCab

I just finished reading "iWoz", in which Steve "Woz" Wozniak describes his view on Apple's history. An interesting and fun book to read!

A few pages before the end Woz talks about the old (classic) Mac OS constantly crashing - until his son downloaded iCab to replace (the now discontinued) IE:mac. Suddenly the crashes were gone!

While it wasn't new to me that Woz was using iCab (I don't know if he still uses it on Mac OS X), I was delighted about iCab being mentioned in such a prominent book :-)