October 2006

iCab 3.0.3 Beta 430

A new iCab beta version is out since yesterday (again, for registered users only). It's a mere bugfix release, according to Alexander's notes:

• In the "Enter Kiosk mode" dialog box there's no default button anymore. It should be now impossible to accidently activate the kiosk mode this way.
• The new feature "Save Session in Web Archive" didn't always work reliable. If external files of the first web page which is saved in the archive were completely downloaded before the download of the main HTML file was finished, the external file was shown when the archive was opened. Now iCab won't create such "broken" archives anymore.
• Texts which were pasted in the text field of the JavaScript Debugger window were not displayed immediately. They were only shown after another keypress.
• Entering Cmd-Return and Cmd-Enter in form fields did crash iCab.
• OnClick events were not always processed immediately if other JavaScript events are still pending.
• The classic version of iCab all the releases in different languages did open the German "compatibility" web page from the Help menu instead of the English version (or the one of another language if available).
• iCab could crash when deleting a CSS struct in certain circumstances.

iCab 3.0.3 Beta 429

Several weeks after the "final" iCab 3.0.3 a new beta version was released to registered users yesterday. It contains lots of bugfixes, and also some new features:

• iCab can record all web pages that the user visits in a certain window or tab automatically into a session archive.
• You can disable the automatic reloading of web pages.
• When searching for text the results are highlighted more clearly.

Here's Alexander's complete list of changes:

• Bugfix for the special frame page of the kiosk mode. This special kiosk frame page must be invisible for JavaScript code, but in a few situations this was not the case.
• JavaScript "onkeydown" events will be now also delivered to FRAMESET elements if no other JavaScript eventhandler has consumed them before.
• Documents in background windows and Tabs will get now less processor time.
• Creating SCRIPT elements via JavaScript and adding them into the HEAD section of the HTML tree to dynamically load external javascript code didn't work in all cases.
• iCab could have freed text nodes which are not used anymore even when Inscript still had a references to these nodes.
• Updated the "UserAgent" strings for the Firefox, Opera and Safari identity so these will now match the strings of latest versions of these browsers.
• In SELECT lists with the MULTIPLE attribut set it is now possible to extend an existing selection by Shift-clicking a list item.
• New feature in the "Tools" menu: "Create Session Archive". When enabling this feature (the menu item will be checked) for a certain window or Tab, iCab will create a web archive and save all webpages into this archive which are opened in this window or tab (either directly by entering the URls or by clicking on links). iCab will save and add everything in the web archive until you switch off the feature again (uncheck the menu item, or when closing the Tab or window). As a remeinder that the "recording" is switched on, the document of this windows or tab will have a red border.
• The keyboard shortcut Cmd-K to enter the kiosk mode can be switched off in the Kiosk preferences now. This can help to prevent that the kiosk mode is activated by accident.
• In the window "Files of the Website" the listed files can be also copied to the finder via Drag & Drop if the Option (ALT) key is pressed. Without pressing the Option key dragging the URLs will only copy the URL to the finder.
• In the "Forms Manager" there's a new setting in the section "Special Websites" which allows to automatically fill out all forms (which were saved before) when the page has finished loading, so it's no longer necessary to use the "Fill out Form" menu item manually.
• New setting in the Preferences dialog (Preferences: Web Content/Page Display; Filtermanager: Display/Output) to be able to disallow the reload of the current web page via "META Refresh". This can be helpful for many news pages which do reload themselves every minute or so.
• When calling the W3C validator from within the contextual menu of iCab to validate the web page that is displayed in the browser window by the W3C validator, iCab will now open some Tabs in the resulting window where the external CSS code is validated as well.
• When searching within a browser window for text, the found text will be now marked with a large transparent bar for a short time so it can be more easily located inside the window. Also the found text will be scrolled slightly more into the center of the window than before to get a better overview about the surrounding content.
• For unknown reasons the MacOS doesn't print images with transparencies or Alpha channel from within the Universal Binary version of iCab. The PowerPC version works fine and uses the identical code, so this is probably a bug of the MacOS itself. So until I found a workaround or Apple fixes this problem, the Universal Binary version of iCab will now ignore transparencies and alpha channels when printing.
• The attribute DATETIME in INS/DEL tags will be now displayed as tooltip, in case there's no title attribute as well, which has a heigher priority.
• URLs with unknown/userdefined internet protocols were deliverd to the correct application, but if the URL scheme didn't match the general URL scheme, the other application could have received an incomplete URL.
• iCab now also delivers keyUpEvents to Plugins. By default, these events won't be sent at all by the MacOS.
• Bugfix when JavaScript asks for the "scrollHeight" of an element.
• Bugfix when changing the height of absolutely positioned elements vias Javascript.
• When entering the kiosk mode, it is not required to enter the password twice (if a passowrd is entered at all), to minimize the risk that the user can't leave the kiosk mode again because of a typo in the passowrd.
• Support for the non-standard charset name "ms932".
• Small modification of a workaround for a MacOS bug which can cause some layout issues with certain fonts and font sizes (when the dimensions of a certain text is measured by the MacOS it returns width and height. If the text is then put into a box of this size and then the MacOS is instructed to layout the text in this box, the MacOS sometimes is unable to put this text into the box anymore, though the MacOS itself has mesured the width and height itself).
• A few plugins won't work correctly anymore if they are scrolled to a location than os more than 32K pixels outside of the visible part of the window. Now iCab makes sure that plugins "think" that they are never scrolled so far.
• If there's no charset definition available for external CSS files iCab didn't treat the UTF-8 BOM marker correctly, if present in the CSS file.
• Another small modification because of an updated CSS 2.1 specification which does now allow min-width/max-width for table elements as well.
• Bugfix when removing documents which were created via JavaScript. iCab deleted the references to these documents only when JavaScript code released these document explicitly.
• Modified the MIME type array that can be accessed via JavaScript so that it is now much smaller than before.
• When uploading files with non-ASCII characters in their file names, iCab always used ISO-8859-1 to encode these names. Now iCab uses the correct encoding that was requested by the server or web page.
• When dragging an URL onto the background of the Tab toolbar of an background window of icab to open the new URL as Tab in this background window did open the URL in the top window instead.
• Small correction for the "classic" Japanese version of iCab: When the non-Unicode text fields were configured in iCab the special Japanese input methods didn't work anymore.
• "content: none" was reported as error because the CSS 2.1 specification has changed some day without changing the version number of the CSS standard. So "my" documentation of the CSS2.1 standard didn't allow the value "none" here while the newer documentation now allows this value.
• Cut/Copy/Paste keyboard shortcuts were not delivered to plugins.
• iCab now includes an additional HTTP header "cache-control: no-cache" in the HTTP request if the page must not be loaded from a cache (for example when releoading the page). Before, iCab has only included "pragma: no-cache" in this case.
• Small corrections in the Russian resources (resizing some buttons etc.).
• Workaround for a bug of MacOSX on Intel Macs which could result in black text on black background when the user has selected certain font smoothing settings in the system preferences.