NetSurf 2.9 released

The NetSurf developers are happy to announce NetSurf 2.9. This release
contains many bug fixes and improvements.

It is available to download from http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

Binaries are available now for RISC OS, AmigaOS 4 and Atari systems.

We plan to make binaries for other platforms available soon.

NetSurf 2.9 contains many improvements over the previous release. The most
significant changes are new multi-tasking behaviour, optimised URL
handling, fetcher optimisations, cache optimisations, and faster CSS
selection.

A more detailed and complete list of changes is given below.


Core / All
----------

* Improved internal management of simultaneously occurring operations.
* Rewritten and streamlined URL handling.
* Improved handling of frames and iframes.
* Improved handling of min/max-width on replaced elements.
* Simplified layout object dimension calculations.
* Reduced memory usage in the fetch layer.
* Disabled extraneous fetch debug code when built without debugging.
* Optimised fetchers.
* Updated MIME sniff handling in accordance with evolution of spec.
* Optimised cache layer.
* Enabled yield and resumption of box tree construction.
* Improved resource handling.
* Added new support for favicons.
* Increased default memory cache size.
* Added about:imagecache status page.
* Optimised URL fragment handling.
* Made meta refresh handling more robust.
* Various minor table layout fixes.
* Cleaned up fetch callback API.
* New hotlist entries can be inserted into defined or selected folder.
* Enabled resizing of textarea widget.
* Fixed cookie expiration.
* Improved handling of CSS overflow scrollbars.
* Fixed caret position after deleting selection in textarea widget.
* Enabled mouse wheel scrolling of frames and other scrollable content.
* Improved handling of file drops, e.g. for HTML form file submission.
* Added the beginnings of a gstreamer binding.
* Fixed some content cache layer issues.
* Improved handling of deletion of nodes from treeviews.
* Added options to disable fetching of images.
* Simplified redraw API rendering options.
* Improved support for drag operations.

* Hubbub library (HTML parser):
+ Fixed xmlns attribute handling.

* LibCSS library (CSS parser and selection engine):
+ Avoid interning standard strings for every stylesheet, style
tag and style attribute.
+ Made significant optimisations to style selection.
+ Fixed case where font-family is unspecified in input CSS.
+ Added some support for @font-face.
+ Fixed !important on opacity property.
+ Added support for parsing CSS3 Multi-column layout properties.

RISC OS
-------

* Removed unused and broken plugin handler.
* Removed normalisation of user input URLs.
* Added support for external hotlist utilities.
* Improved signal handling.
* Improved keyboard input handling.
* Various fixes.
* Fixed Drawfile export not to show interactive features.
* Improved scroll event handling.

GTK-specific
------------

* Improved resource handling.
* Cleaned up handling of tabs.
* Made tab bar position configurable.
* Updated plotters to use Cairo surfaces throughout.
* Enabled search-as-you-type of page content.
* Fixed ~/.netsurf directory permissions.

AmigaOS-specific
----------------

* Improved mouse handling.
* Improved multi-tasking behaviour.
* Increased keyboard scroll speed.
* Better MIME type handling.
* Improved contextual menu handling.
* Enabled context menu for frames.
* Enabled context menu for plain text contents.
* Improved aspect ratio handling.
* Consolidated user file operations.
* Fixed scrolling issues.
* Improved resource handling.
* Improved tab bar handling.
* Improved drag handling.
* Improved font handling.
* Improved clipboard support.

Mac OS X-specific
-----------------

* Fixed build.

Atari-specific
--------------

* Added context menu.
* View source support.
* Use favicon when iconified.
* Removed unneeded frames handling code.
* Fixed rectangle plotter.
* Simplified status bar.
* Improved download window.
* Improved URL bar.
* Fixed conversion from local encoding to UTF-8.
* Improved scheduler.
* Added save page support.
* Added settings dialogue.
* Enabled view source feature.
* Added support for 8-bit displays.

Framebuffer-specific
--------------------

* Reduced excessive logging.
* Implemented RAM surfaces, instead of direct blitting.
* Fixed VNC surface.
* Enabled thumbnailing in local history view.

Also included are many smaller bug fixes, improvements and
documentation enhancements.

--

Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/