July 2006

iCab 3.0.2 Beta 423

Obviously there were some reasons not to release iCab beta 422 as the next public version, because beta 423 was released today again to registered users only.

Alexander mentions the following reasons in his release history:

• Because the "Flash Plugin Enabler" is no longer listed in the plugin preferences, it could happen that with the update to Beta 422 the Flash plugin was no longer enabled because before only the "Flash Plugin Enabler" was enabled.
• Bugfix: In a plugin which initiated a download aborted and destroyed this download immediately when iCab passes the very first byte of the downloaded data to the plugin, iCab could crash.
• In the "search" field of iCab (for google, yahoo, etc.) the "&" character was not encoded correctly internally, so the search failed when it includes the "&" character.
• Bugfix for "floating" elements in "inline-block" elements.
• If JavaScript code includes new HTML code into the currently loading HTML code in a very special way, iCab could crash.
• Bugfix for certain GIF animations.
• Bugfix for calculating the minimum box height so that no unwanted scrollbars will appear anymore.

iCab 3.0.2 Beta 422

Another iCab beta version has been released on July, 14th. The new version fixes some crashes and adds a workaround for the Flash plug-in enabler.

If there aren't any severe problems in this beta version, it will be the next public preview version!

iCab 3.0.2 Beta 420 (UB only)

Wow, Alexander releases new iCab versions quicker than I'm able to update my blog ;-)

The new beta version replaces the UB version only and fixes a crash on startup when certain plug-ins are installed.

iCab 3.0.2 Beta 418 / 419

Coming home from my trip to München (Munich) where I was giving some days of Java training (and of course enjoying some of the World Cup parties ;-) I found that Alexander had released two iCab beta versions in the meantime. Both versions contain bugfixes and workarounds for Mac OS X and some plug-ins. Here's what Alexander writes about the two betas:

Beta 418:

• Saved Form data will be now only retreived from the keychain when these are needed (affects only the Universal binary).
• In the PPC version for MacOSX/Classic a certain routine was exchanged which could have caused crashes in longer downloads.
• Users of Intel Macs should definitly update to MacOSX 10.4.7, which will fix the problem with the yellow alpha channel of PNG images and FavIcons. Unfortunately Apple has introduced a new bug which affects certain other images and these images are now also displayed in yellow under certain circumstances. The new MacOSX bug on Intel Macs will affect images with a color depth up to 8 Bit per pixel which are displayed smaller than their original size. To work around this new bug of the MacOS, the new iCab beta will convert all the images with a color depth of 8 Bit (and less) into images with a color depth of 32 Bit per Pixel (RGB and Alpha channel). This way all images will be displayed correctly, though they may need much more memory now.

Beta 419:

• Workaround for another Bug of the MacOSX on Intel-Macs where images with a width of 16 pixels and a color depths of 32 Bits without Alpha channel, the unused 8 Bit per pixel are treated as alpha channel. Now iCab will set these unused bits to the proper value if this would be the alpha channel and changes the pixel format so that it will really describe an image with alpha channel. This way the MacOS is displaying these images correct on Intel-Macs again. This problem does not occur on images which have a larger width.
• Fixed a bype-order problem on Intel Macs when evaluation the version resources of iCab. This affected non-roman languages (like Russian or Japanese) in the Universal Binary version where the "Tab" buttons used the wrong text encoding on Intel Macs.
• Bugfix for (ancient) Plugins for MacOSX which were not in "Bundle" file format. In the Universal Binary version of PPC Macs these plugins crashed because the main entry point was not automatically translated into Mach-O calling conventions.
• The onmouseup event handler (JavaScript) was not called for all clicks of multiple clicks (like double-clicks).
• Small modification for the Flash Plugin for Intel Macs which doesn't seem to be thread-safe and therefore crashes easily when the downloaded data was passed to the plugin from within the download thread of iCab. So now iCab caches the downloaded date from the download thread and will deliver this data to the plugin from the main thread instead. This avoids the flash plugin crashes.