Judging by what the duck says Midori must be the only project in the world migrating from git to bzr. Or maybe, it was just so surprisingly quick and simple that there’s no need to brag about it. In fact Launchpad itself performed the import automagically and the switch is really about updating documentation and a cuple of hyperlinks. It might’ve been harder if I wasn’t familiar with bzr yet; pushing the new trunk and flipping an option to make it the focus branch was all that was needed.

The old world

Why did we actually make this step? To make project management more efficient. Midori as a project roughly might be split into

• bug triaging
• reviewing contributions
• implementing code
• design decisions
• roadmap

It turns out a huge bottle neck was the manual effort standing between these separate aspects. For example anyone doing bug triaging wouldn’t have direct access to code. And code review was always separate from both code and bug management. To the point that people end up waiting on, looking for and blocking on each other. And losing contributors, which is the worst thing to happen to any free software project.

The new world

• There’s an obvious, easy way for anyone to push branches
• Code review is integrated with branches and bugs
• Anyone can become a reviewer, merge and push code

bzr vs. git

I do enjoy a proper emotional project bashing as much as the next guy, especially with a beer in front of me. But really, these days bzr and git both have a comparable share, personally I work on either one on and off. And at the end of the day what counts is the health of Midori as a project. Bazaar may well have the weaker storage efficiency and performance compared to git in a benchmark, but in this case git had the higher human cost.

Go ahead and contribute now

And, with a miserable impersonation of River Song I’ll say “There is more exciting changes to come… spoilers”.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!