Thomas Much's Weblog

iCab 3.0.3 Beta 451 - Atomic

iCab beta 451 fixes several bugs and adds the possibility to display Atom feeds with the built-in RSS reader. Here is Alexander's complete list of changes in the new version:

• Workaround for a bug in classic MacOS if not using the Unicode TextEdit fields in web forms. In certain circumstances the non-Unicode text fields could cause a crash if the text field was empty when trying to insert some text.
• Added a workaround for the buggy Javascript code of the yahoo image search feature when using the Firefox identity setting. Yahoo uses the most complicated way one can think of to open the back/forward links. It first deactivates the links to do the whole processing via JavaScript. The JS code then will first load a small image file that is never used at all. But only after this image was downloaded, the javascript code will open the original link now. But unfortunately it initializes some variables after they are needed when processing some of the JavaScript events. So iCab will now delay som of the events to give the yahoo script more time for initializing these variables.
• Bugfix for the CSS rule "html { font-family: inherit; }, which could cause a crash. The HTML element is the root element (it has no parents) and therefore can't inherit anything from its parent elements. iCab did nevertheless try to inherit from its non-existing parents.
• Checking the validity of SSL certificates could fail because of a buffer that was too small. So iCab could have reported an invalid certificate which was valid.
• Added an optimization for the new ebay layout and the new pull down menus of the ebay site. These menus are very badly programmed. The menu code uses a special exception handling for Safari and IE browsers. And this special code is programmed in a way so that it does all the "expensive" calculations which are needed for Safari or IE before(!) testing if these calculations are necessary, and so in iCab these calculations are done multiple times and afterwards the result is ignored because iCab is neither Safari or IE. Also these calculations are don is way which is most ineffective and even "dangerous" because it can lead to many problems. The optimization for ebay is to cache requests to the HTML code that can be retreived by "innerHTML" in JavaScript.
• The optimization for activating/deactivating StyleSheets from within JavaScript didn't work correctly if only a single StyleSheet was deactivated in a JavaScript call.
• The build in RSS reader does now also support "Atom" feeds. Also if the RSS feed does not provide any links to the articles (which is usually the case when the articles ar already part of the RSS feed) the article list will get much more room and the content area where the article links would be opened otherwise gets less space.
• The enhanced RSS reader is now also available in the classic version of iCab.