Major Update for Ibrowse

by **21stcentury** Sun 3 Dec - 18:14

The most known Amiga browser is now available with a major update. His author announce that IBrowse 2 and 3 are now fully merged.

"It's finally time to move on from IBrowse 2, which has been developed for over 20 years! IBrowse 3.0 makes available the previously unreleased features that were originally being worked on alongside IBrowse 2.4 (on a completely separate development branch), whilst retaining everything from IBrowse 2.5.9 and all the new developments since its release.

The IBrowse 2 and 3 development branches are now fully merged, which was a complex and time-consuming task, due to considerable divergence.
The process was completed methodically and carefully, in order to not compromise stability or lose any functionality. Development can now move forward without being restricted to the limitations of the IBrowse 2 framework, allowing for more substantial changes."

Here is the long list of updates

IBrowse 2 and IBrowse 3 Unification

It's finally time to move on from IBrowse 2, which has been developed for over 20 years! IBrowse 3.0 makes available the previously unreleased features that were originally being worked on alongside IBrowse 2.4 (on a completely separate development branch), whilst retaining everything from IBrowse 2.5.9 and all the new developments since its release. The IBrowse 2 and 3 development branches are now fully merged, which was a complex and time-consuming task, due to considerable divergence. The process was completed methodically and carefully, in order to not compromise stability or lose any functionality. Development can now move forward without being restricted to the limitations of the IBrowse 2 framework, allowing for more substantial changes.

New Reimagined HTML Parser

Debut of our new faster, more efficient and easily expandable HTML parser, originally designed for IBrowse 3.0 by Stefan Burstroem. The opportunity was also taken to add support for some missing HTML 4.01 tags and attributes.

Improved HTML Engine

The HTML engine has been improved with numerous layout and rendering enhancements, including tables, lists and superscript + subscript text.

Hotlist Multi-aliasing

When entering a hotlist alias as a URL, all of your hotlist URLs matching the alias will each be opened in their own browser tab. Additionally, hotlist entries can now be given multiple aliases (separated by a space).

Early Data / Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT)

In conjunction with our SSL session cache feature, 0-RTT improves HTTPS and Gemini performance further still by sending requests in advance of connection handshake completion for a resumed session, reducing the time taken to establish connections. Available on TLSv1.3 connections with servers that are 0-RTT enabled.

Better GIF Animation Playback

The GIF decoder has several fixes for incorrect decoding of images and the GIF animation playback code has been improved to play more animations as intended.

AmigaOS 3.2 Context Sensitive Mouse Pointers

IBrowse is now able to directly use the mouse pointer imagery from AmigaOS 3.2, in addition to the existing support for AmigaOS 4.x and MUI 4/5 mouse pointers. This behaviour can be adjusted in the preferences, using the newly expanded setting, allowing you to switch between different imagery.

NList GUI Consistency

In IBrowse 2, some GUI elements used NList/NListtree, whilst others used other list classes. For consistency and performance, everything now uses NList/NListtree.

Preferences

IBrowse's preferences window has been improved, now placed in a virtual group, allowing it to work better on low resolution screens. Checkbox labels are now clickable too and the window now has a "Save" button. New default settings change the look of IBrowse, giving it borderless image-only toolbar buttons and white as the default page colour (you are, of course, free to amend these as you prefer).

Decompression and Image Decoding Libraries Upgraded

Zlib has been upgraded to v1.3, Brotli to v1.1.0 and libpng to v1.6.40, ensuring IBrowse is up to date with security advisories and the latest, fastest code.

Space Saving

As IBrowse (and AmiSSL) grow, we continue to make modifications to improve efficiency throughout the code. The biggest changes in this area are the separate HTTP and HTTPS protocol libraries being been merged into a single library and the duplicated zlib code being removed from the PNG decoder module, which now uses the existing zlib code from IBrowse itself.

Let's be happy with this superb update, which will make browsing even more comfortable on Amiga.

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