WebKit2, downloads, web apps and clang

With a slightly prolongued freeze period Midori 0.5.1 0.5.2 is out of the door. We made a big leap on the promised WebKit2 support – it’s not fully done yet but very, very usable despite not having context menus and some extensions are to be done. Definitely worth giving a go for anyone curious about multi-process goodness who can live without adblock if need be.

Downloads and web app support have both received major refactoring, making the code much more modular and approachable, and fixing buglets and adding polish along the way. Downloads work more reliably across windows and more quality control across panel and toolbar. The way is paved for even more goodness. For the first time you can manage web apps/ launchers created from within Midori graphically. This is also up for even more improvements.

To round it up a whole lot of code improvements have come from static analysis such as clang (LLVM) and other sources and a number of buglets were squashed. Despite all the bigger changes QA is looking very good. Note to self: having strict feature freeze periods before every release is paying off, even if it’s hard in a small team.

Update: I apparently goofed up the release process and 0.5.1 insists it is still 0.5.0. To reduce confusion this is 0.5.2 now, same thing, but with a proper version.

So download Midori v0.5.2 (1.1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Also Midori v0.5.2 32-bit Portable for Windows (32 MB) or Midori v0.5.2 32-bit Installer for Windows (34 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!

High five

Time for Midori 0.5.0. I’ll say upfront the big number 5 doesn’t convey any major amazements or surprises. What this number does mean is two things that will unfold their true meaning in the near future: We’re adding support for WebKit2 behind the scenes, much of which didn’t make the feature freeze. Another behind the scenes feature is improved extension loading, which will enable extensions in private browsing or in app mode.

A small highlight is in fact the Cookie Security Manager. What’s hiding behind this name you may wonder. Accepting, or rejecting and managing cookies per site as they come in real-time with infobars. The perfect augmentation for Cookie Manager and of course nice in combination with Clear Private Data and Adblock.

On the command line and kiosk use case front, -e or –execute has become a great deal more powerful. It’s now trivial to update any settings at startup or during runtime, as well as enabling or disabling extensions.

The speed dial has always been a cause of heated discussions. Many people want to have a custom page in new tabs, others want just the bare empty page to keep focussed on the task at hand (or even the subjective efficiency of not loading the speed dial). So we finally allow configuring what new tabs display. It’s now also possible to use speed dial as your homepage, from a bookmark or even the command line. about:version lists the new alias URLs, including about:dial and about:home.

There’s more treats to be found, such as completely configurable Mouse Gestures, waiting for a GUI to be added, maybe a good starting point for a new contributor. And History List finally supports ColorFul Tabs fully.

As of this release, any proxy server type supported by libproxy will in fact be accepted. The server including the protocol can be set via its curl-esque syntax in the preferences.

So download Midori v0.5.0 (1.1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Also Midori v0.5.0 32-bit Portable for Windows (32 MB) or Midori v0.5.0 32-bit Installer for Windows (34 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!

WebKit2, Cookie Policies and more

It’s this time of the month again. Midori 0.4.9 is there, 3 weeks of features and 1 week of bug fixes is the new mantra, giving everyone higher quality as a result.

Anyone experiencing crashes on closing Adlock preferences, using Backspace in the urlbar under the wrong circumstances or attaching the inspector will rejoice, those buglets were resolved. Along with a resizing issue in the news feed extension and possible loss of the saved tab session if the disk is full.

A new extension is being developed to manage cookie accept behavior per domain. Too late for feature freeze it’s excempt from stable installs, but interested folks can try it in a build from source, likely to be available in the next cycle.

Midori relies on GTK+ 3.4 touchscreen support now, including kinetic scrolling. This lets us drop extra support code and rely on the same code used by other applications.

As a small bonus, ‘Google Translate (gt)’ was added to the default search engines. Use “gt WORD” or “gt URL” to translate using Google’s translation service. You can also right-click a selected word and use ‘Search with’ to the same effect.

Evidently the coolest thing to announce is WebKit2 preparation – again, preparation not full support. Indeed –enable-webkit2 will build Midori with the multi-process API. Most non-trivial features are silently missing but it’s the first step into a shiny new world.

So download Midori v0.4.9 (1.1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Also Midori v0.4.9 32-bit Portable for Windows (31.9 MB) or Midori v0.4.9 32-bit Installer for Windows (33.2 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!

64-bit Windows and FlashGet

Here we go with the Windows build following Midori 0.4.8. For the first time, an experimental 64-bit version is available – no HTML5 video just yet. FlashGet is supported as an external download manager: just like on Linux and BSD, in the Preferences under the Extensions tab it can be activated.

Again, portable mode is officially supported. The 7z versions include a “portable.bat” which runs Midori out of the folder. It can be copied to a USB stick and will keep all data in the “profile” folder in the same folder instead of storing files in the system user folder.

Get Midori v0.4.8 32-bit Portable for Windows (31.9 MB) or Midori v0.4.8 64-bit Portable for Windows (22.8 MB) or Midori v0.4.8 32-bit Installer for Windows (33.2 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!

Goulash needs to cook long to be tasty

As they say, the exception proves the rule. Consequently Midori 0.4.8 fermented a little longer than most releases. The number of bug fixes is too plenty to make for a good read: let it be said that bugs in 0.4.7 with opening Midori in different modes, GLib-related build errors and forever delayed pages are gone – now on to the new features.

Autocompletion includes open tabs now, is generally more responsive and open to more extensions in the near future. Speaking of extensions, Netscape plugins can be individually enabled and disabled seemlessly.

Icon loading received a major refactoring, bookmarks and search engines mostly wave goodbye to the well-known “default icon”.
Support for Granite 0.2 was improved big time. As a treat, autocompletion features a side-by-side layout.
To round things up, inline search highlights all matches by default to increase readability and the urlbar tries harder to keep selected text working as expected.

Spoiler alert: The Win32 version will support FlashGet. Updated builds are still in the making. Incidentally if you missed it, on Linux wget, SteadyFlow or any other command line-accessible external download manager can be used.

So download Midori v0.4.8 (1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Bringing GTK+3, Faenza and Flash to Windows

Meet the former experimental Windows build going gold with Midori 0.4.7. This was the build that added HTML5 video codecs and proper Unicode support (read: Japanese/ Chinese font display). Add to that GTK+3 support, Faenza icons and Netscape plugins – yes, that means Adobe Flash works out of the box.
We started shipping CA certificates as Windows doesn’t have these system-wide by default.

angry birds html5 game on windows

Spell checking is also supported if you download the OpenOffice dictionaries and copy them into share/myspell/dicts/ in Midori’s installation folder. All of those dictionaries would roughly equal the size of Midori so we opted for not including them by default.

Known issues in this release

  • You cannot resize the Feed Reader extension properly
  • Cursor does not change appearance on links/ text areas
  • The History list extension is currently not usable

A portable mode is now officially supported. The 7z version includes a “portable.bat” which runs Midori out of the folder. It can be copied to a USB stick and will keep all data in the “profile” folder in the same folder instead of storing files in the system user folder.

Get Midori v0.4.7 Portable for Windows (33.4 MB) or Midori v0.4.7 Installer for Windows (34.6 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!

Downloading, certificates and funny acronyms

Midori 0.4.7 has reached a new level of downloading experience. Panel and statusbar consistently verify file integrity, show size, remaining time and speed of a file. An icon and expected file size are displayed before saving a file. External download managers, namely SteadyFlow, Aria2 or command-line based such as wget are available in the preferences. To counter phishing sites which fake downloads as demonstrated by Michal Zalewski the origin of the file is clearly visible. Finally, you can now save whole websites including any images, scripts and other resources – optionally.

On the topic of security Midori has reached another milestone. Goodbye colorful urlbar, you were beautiful but let’s face it, once you get used to the colors nobody pays attention even when it’s read. What this means is that SSL errors are now fatal by default – conveniently we can use GCR, a library based on GNOME keyring, to show plenty of detail for a certificate. Once you “Trust” a website other GCR-using applications can also trust it.
The cherry on the secure cake is HSTS, not to be confused with whatever Wikipedia may suggest it stands for, HTTP Strict Transport Security, which Midori recognizes and caches behind the scenes – no UI by design, you get SSL without typing https.

For lots of other exciting goodies in this release, see the ridiculously long beast of a change log. And stay tuned on the Windows build – it’s going to follow soon.

So download Midori v0.4.7 (1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Have you ever seen a catfish?

Thanks to Sean Davis who took up the rod and design input from Simon Steinbeiß of Shimmer fame I’m happy to show off Catfish 0.4! For a bit of history, read the previous post.

catfish slim

Catfish 0.4 features a revamped interface based on GTK+3. Searches are now powered by locate and find behind the scenes, with autocompletion from Zeitgeist and locate. The advanced options allow filtering by date and file type.

So download Catfish v0.4.0.1 (41 kB) (Release on Launchpad) already!

Or get the development version from Launchpad in bzr:

https://launchpad.net/catfish-search

bzr branch lp:catfish-search

Freshly-fried Flying Catfish

After quite some time of abandonment of Catfish there’s finally a maintainer. Sean Davis decided to take over the project and started by porting to GTK+3 and adding quite a few nice features (see below).
This is good news for some distributions that still ship Catfish or even use it as default search tool (e.g. Xubuntu).

catfish slim

All in all, the focus of development has been to make Catfish easier to use, power-users can use the command-line. For fetching results quickly, “locate” (which uses a database) has been made the default, but other search engines are in use incrementally. This means that the user doesn’t have to worry about changing/ choosing search-engines anymore and getting different result-sets. In this sense Catfish has become much more like what people are used to nowadays from the web, also in terms of the User Interface.

catfish advanced mode

Features / under the hood:
* Default search engine is now “locate” (“find” can be used as fallback if “locate” doesn’t retrieve the desired file/s)
* Search suggestions as you type (using locate and Zeitgeist, if installed)
* Update the search-index of the locate-database
* Live result-filtering by date and mimetype
* Fulltext search (search file-content)
* Multiple search terms are not treated like a single string anymore (instead connected by “AND”, e.g. “cat fish” searches for files that contain “cat” and “fish”, not just “cat fish”)
* Cleaner user interface

The project is now hosted on Launchpad in bzr:

https://launchpad.net/catfish-search
bzr branch lp:catfish-search

Hacking your search engine

One of the main reasons why I use DuckDuckGo is the instant answers it serves. Without having to do anything I get my wiki, my code questions, my lyrics and whatever else suggested. Lucky enough the company behind the search engine implements those, right?

Wrong. Everyone can write plugins for DuckDuckGo now. It is as hackable as Midori is, except it’s Perl. There’s a tutorial at http://duckduckhack.com/. There are lots of proposed ideas already. s/The sky/Free time/g is the limit!