Thomas Much's Weblog

iCab 3.0.2 Beta 386 in Session

The first iCab beta version in 2006 offers the option to save all open documents automatically (and restore them the next time iCab is started). It's called "auto-save session" and you'll find it at the end of the "File" menu. Oh, yes, and "Digest Authentication" is supported, finally. Other new features and fixes since beta 382 include:

• Workaround for JavaScript code which generates invalid HTML code with missing but required end tags like </SELECT> and which ask for these Elements to modify them again in the same JavaScript call.
• Better recognition of RSS feeds where the server sends a wrong "Content-Type"
• The "Content-Disposition: attachment" HTTP header will now force a download.
• Fixed a small memory leak.
• Fixed a problem when disabling StyleSheets via JavaScript.
• Small modification for the "Flip4Mac" Plugin (for WMV files). This plugin treats the origin setting slightly different than the other browser plugins, which caused WMV files to be displayed shifted to the bottom and to the right.
• Small modification in the JavaScript property "navigator.appVersion" to prevent that "iWeb"-generated web pages treat iCab as Internet Explorer for Windows when iCab uses its default identity setting. "iWeb" rearranges its code when it encounters the browser IE for windows and this would make some images invisible in iCab. With this modification iWeb sites will now work with the default identity as well, so there's no need to change to the "Firefox" identity.
• When HTML "block" elements were nested in HTML "inline" elements (which is invalid), the "clearance" of floats could fail in certain circumstances.
• Fixed an issue with receiving gzip-compressed data from the server.
• When JavaScript code created lists using the W3C-DOM, the list item bullets were not initialized correctly.
• If JavaScript code created a new SCRIPT element to dynamically load a new external JavaScript file, iCab didn't load this file.
• If JavaScript code removed the text of an OPTION element, iCab could crash.
• Fixed an issue with the history menu. If a submenu of the history menu contains more than 400 items, iCab didn't list the newest items anymore.
• "about:"-URLs will no longer used for the URL completion.
• Fixed a small issue in the CSS properties min-width/max-width/min-height/max-height
• If a web page contains the BODY or HTML tags many times (which is invalid) nested deep insider other tags, there were some layout issues.
• An IFRAME document could not retreive the NAME attribute of its own IFRAME tag.
• The option "Always show Scrollbars in Frames" will now also enable scrollbars in popup windows which are opened by JavaScript code and where the scrollbar is switched off by the JavaScript code, even if the whole content can not be displayed without scrollbars.
• Added some new workarounds for some new invalid HTML code on the Apple web page.

Alexander also mentions one special OS (Carbon?) bug that he's fixed (or found a workaround for):

• Because of an error in MacOSX (at least in MacOS 10.3.x and 10.4.x) when retrieving the location of the temporary items folder, iCab sometimes get an invalid folder information from the MacOSX and so downloads may fail and displaying a web site could result in only displaying an error message "-43" (in very rare conditions the MacOSX seems to put an invalid folder references into an internal cache and if an application asks for the temporary items folder it will get the invalid data from this cache. And because the MacOS seems to never update its cache when after gets corrupt, the only fix is to relaunch the application. This error is so rare that most users probably have never seen this so far).
  iCab tries to find out if this error occurs and then will try to find an alternative folder for its temporary files. But this did not always work in the past. Now iCab should work much better in this error condition. But to get some additional information, iCab will now display some debugging messages in its Console window (can be opend from within the "Tools" menu) when it find out that MacOSX starts to return invalid data about the temorary items folder. In case you notice some output about "LTemporaryFileStream" in the Console Window please send this output to <support ät icab.de>. In case you see an error -43 message in the browser window when loading a web page (which shouldn't happen anymore), please open the "Console" Window and send me its content as well.