News and announcements
Speed dial, private browsing, user agents
Written for Midori Web Browser by Michael Moroni on 2011-05-04
So Midori is going full speed ahead, we support the new libSoup cache now (WebKitGTK+ 1.3.11 or greater required) which supersedes the old extension, support for F6, F7 and Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab and Tab in completion and a faster speed dial, which is still in the middle of even greater improvements, so stay stuned for more goodness in the future.
Private browsing has received a number of improvements such as masking of the timezone, language, architecture and Netscape plugins, disabling of DNS prefetching, disabling all HTML5 storage facilities and stripping referrer details - the last one is also available as a preference in the Privacy options now, and prevents unrelated websites from seeing search strings or sub pages. You can use the --private switch on the command line now to open a window in private browsing mode.
Motivated by user agent changes of Firefox and Chrome, Midori takes the opportunity to omit the language and encryption from the user agent, and prefixes with Mozilla now in an attempt at increasing uniformity of user agents. It resolves typical issues such as Facebook and other websites mistaking Midori for a mobile phone browser or Google hiding interface tweaks (you know, the guys doing their best to ignore their own ideals).
Fingerprints, Frequent questions and fidelity
Written for Midori Web Browser by Michael Moroni on 2011-03-14
One thing history shows is, nobody wants to write documentation. Even though a number of people actually offered to do so, it never happened. And then you notice, hey, there is the FAQ in the wiki, and it is full of tips and tricks, and attracts users to suggest improvements. So why not use that as the documentation? So that's what we do now. A side effect is that it will always be shipped because no longer is docutils needed. Which bears another lesson: if you make it too easy to disable something people may start to think it is not useful at all.
A sudden enlightenment as it sometimes happens and luck while typing key words into DuckDuckGo brought me to: Link Fingerprints. I have been very well aware of the utility of checksums for years. And yet, I will admit, I often enough ignore downloads which offer me an SHA1 or MD5 sum to verify my files. Why? Because it is different for every single site and because I have to fire up a console to switch to the right folder and compute the checksum, depending on which one is provided. That is simply annoying.
So I thought there must be a way to handle that automatically. And within minutes I found a Firefox extension that reads "fingerprints" embedded in hyperlinks. From this version on Midori will show such a checksum and display a warning if it doesn't match. I use this for new releases of Midori from now on.
Menubar, multiple infobars and Win32
Written for Midori Web Browser by Michael Moroni on 2011-02-20
Aiming to get back to a sane release cycle, this release fixes crash on autocompletion, adblock which was half-broken in the last release, duplication of bookmarks on startup and using the Go button to open addresses.
This release by default has no menubar in new installations. Existing users can right-click the toolbar and select 'Menubar' to the same effect. The 'app menu', also called 'compact menu' informally, has existed in previous versions but I was concerned it didn't fully replace the menubar functionally, I am now confident it does provide the better experience.
Spontaneous collaboration of users on IRC brought up proper restoring of tab order in the session. This is the kind of small detail I personally never noticed much but people who care about it were able to make a big difference literally over night, just before the release.
Fans of user scripts and styles will welcome that they will no longer see multiple infobars in the wrong tab, and support for the review pages on userscripts.org.
Bookmarks can now be exported to Netscape HTML, as compatible as possible in light of apparent bugs of other browsers with regard to escaping.
Progress and search engines in location are now mandatory, as well as download notification bubbles. The statusbar no longer popups up for downloads if it was explicitly hidden. This is clearer and works better.
There is also a way to reload uncached now with a hotkey, by default Ctrl+Shift+R.
Finally thanks to Paweł we have a new Win32 release again. Note that this should be considered an unstable release as it didn't undergo much testing, so installing it in a separate location is recommended. Any feedback and bug reports are very welcome, and especially anyone willing to investigate Win32-specific problems will be appreciated. I must give kudos to Peter who made the previous releases possible and made a huge effort at polishing the Win32 builds.
There is only an archive and no installer at this time.
File choosing, passwords and translations
Written for Midori Web Browser by Michael Moroni on 2011-02-20
So I started to get back to WebKitGTK+ hacking after being inactive for a while, Lanedo kindly sponsors some time for me me to work on WebKit. I spent some time to get an overview of the bug load while doing test builds, which still require patience and a lot of tea, despite the two 2 2.5GHz cores I have.
So I updated and improved the proposed patch for WebKitFileChooser API, which should allow applications to provide their own file chooser, preset the right folder and keep track of uploaded files, including support for multiple files.
A seemingly simple issue is support for input methods in password fields which is basically unconditionally disabled right now. By extension virtual keyboards can't be used. What stalled this in the first place is that the Mac port has completely different code for it and understandably reviewers are hesitant to continue working around the inconsistency.
I noticed prominently a number of translations slumbering in bugzilla, so I actually went ahead and committed all I found except one (waiting for reply from the translator). And it may be possible to add these to the next stable release as well.
Pan Scrolling is a popular feature. You may have never heard of the name, at least I didn't know that term before I found out WebKit calls it that. Middle click on a page, and a four-directional mouse pointer appears, allowing you to scroll by moving the mouse. The featues is right now disables by default in WebKitGTK+ and depends on a build-time option. I updated a patch to add a runtime setting, and I am also proposing to make it unconditional. Waiting for feedback.
I also fixed too many spelling suggestions and a redundant separator in context menus. Small but very noticible bugs.
Thousand and one bug fixes
Written for Midori Web Browser by Michael Moroni on 2011-01-31
Thousand and one bug fixes, that's what this release turned out to be. A long run of tweaks in various places rather than short and explosive. Kudos to Paweł for his great work, notably with bookmark import and export, including Netscape HTML import, and a new infobar prompting to install userscripts and -styles if the User Addons extension is activated.
A rather big move is Launchpad as the new bug tracker. I have tested it and am convinced of the superiour usability over FlySpray and Bugzilla. And this addresses the frequently raised concern of using a unique bug tracker, so it should be easier to report bugs with an existing account and a familiar interface. The old bug tracker still exists and will remain in place for a while, but new bugs should be reported at Launchpad. The code repository and translations remain with Xfce and Midori is still fully usable and supported on it, and dozens of other platforms. Kudos to Dan and Michael for moving over a huge number of bug reports.
The new default search engine is DuckDuckGo, https:/
Problems with ',' and '.' for link search and inline search with Russian keyboard layouts have been fixed. Options for languages and panel layout have been simplified. Netscape plugins no longer show up in the Extensions panel due to repeated confusion with users. URIs keep spaces encoded as %20 to allow copying to other applications. And context menu-related problems have been fixed.
