At the time of writing, the updated documentation for IBrowse 2.4 is not yet available, but will be available from www.ibrowse-dev.net when it is ready. In the meantime, the IBrowse 2.3 documentation is available to view online. New Features in IBrowse 2.4 The full list of changes can be found in the changes summary and the revision log. Please note: a flash plugin is not included here due to licensing restrictions, but is available for free from www.ibrowse-dev.net. Search Bar - IBrowse now has an integrated Search Bar attached to the URL Tool bar. The Search Bar consists of a cycle gadget which allows you to select which search engine to use, a string gadget for any queries, and a button to execute the search. Entries can be added to the search bar manually via the preferences, or by selecting New... from the cycle gadget. The latter method will take you to a new webpage on the IBrowse Development website which will list Amiga specific searches for you to add into IBrowse. Additionally, the Search Bar supports the Mycroft search engine standard used by Firefox and Mozilla, which gives you instant access to in excess of 9,500 pre-configured search engines via the Mycroft project! Although referred to as the Search Bar, it is actually more flexible than that, allowing you to add a query string to any URL of your choosing. The result is, you can add dictionary or translation services to the prefs allowing you to enter a word, select the service, click the button and have the word looked up or translated. For this reason, the text in the button is configurable - so you could specify "Go!" for searches, and "Translate" for translations etc. As the Search Bar is not currently dragable separately to the main URL Tool bar, you may find it takes too much space in the GUI. If so, it can be disabled in the preferences. A new FAB menu has also been added to the Location: gadget, to allow pasting of the standard protocols directly into the gadget via the mouse. Graphical Status bar - The Status Bar has been overhauled to optionally provide the status of IBrowse graphically. Due to requiring less space than text, this has allowed us to show additional statuses such as when Javascript is being processed. The status images shown are: Data Source -> Either Internet, Cache or Local Spoofing -> Either none (i.e.. IBrowse) or some (i.e.. Firefox) Javascript -> Shown when any JS is being executed Popup Blocked -> Shown when WACL blocked one or more popups Secure -> Shown when using a https:// connection, along with the encryption strength Plugin API system for embedded objects - Based on the v4 NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) to allow for easier porting of NS compatible plugins, this is used to allow IBrowse to display embedded objects within the browser when a suitable plugin is available. The most common embedded object would probably be Flash animations, followed by Movie clips. Another example of a plugin is a PDF viewer, which can still be viewed embedded in the browser, although its not embedded in a page per se. The MIME Prefs will allow you to configure the plugins, either activating or deactivating the entire plugin, or activating or deactivating certain MIME types related to the plugin. For example, if you had two movie plugins that both handled different formats, but they both also happened to handle MPEG, then you could activate both plugins, but deactivate the MPEG MIME Type for one of them, whilst the other one remains enabled. A new FAB menu has been added for any embedded content, along with a new place holder %e to provide access to the URL of the embedded content. AmiSSLv3 support - Support for the latest AmiSSL release has been added to IBrowse 2.4, allowing the use of the most up to date SSL implementation available for AmigaOS. AmigaOS4 users will be able to benefit from the improved speed of the PPC native SSL implementation, and other AmigaOS compatible systems will be able to use the 68k implementation. As before, AmiSSLv3's use with IBrowse can be configured in the Security -> Ciphers preferences. Optional context pointer support Support for context sensitive pointers has been added, providing different mouse pointers in different areas of IBrowse. Currently, there is a hand pointer (with clicking finger!), horizontal and vertical re-size/drag pointers, and a grab pointer for moving frame dividers. These will not be configurable in 2.4, but they can be disabled. Configurable pointers is planned for IB3. Browser Tabs - Support for background tab loading has finally been added. Links can be opened in new browsers which remain inactive, allowing you to continue browsing the original page uninterrupted. Links can be opened conditionally in active or inactive browsers via the FAB menu, or for links that open in a new browser via JS or target _blank, they can be controlled globally from the IBrowse prefs by setting the default activation method. Finally, the NEWBROWSER ARexx command can specify whether the browser should be active, inactive or as per the prefs. Additionally, there have been some additions to the browser tab FAB menu. Preliminary character set and utf-8 support (AmigaOS4 Only) One of the new features of AmigaOS4 is the ability to use fonts that provide multiple character set mappings. IBrowse has been enhanced to take advantage of this feature, allowing the page to be displayed in the character set specified by the page. There are some limitations to this, including that it only affects text in the HTML display (not the window title, tab titles, embedded MUI objects used in forms, etc.). Also utf-8 decoding is mostly restricted to mapping back to characters available in the windows-1252 character set. This feature is "work in progress", with a better solution planned for IB3, but we saw no harm in making the current functionality available in the meantime. In the Font preferences you will find a new option to control the handling of the character sets: Custom - This option will cause IBrowse² to always use the specified character set. Webpage chooses - This option will cause IBrowse² to use the character set specified by the webpage when applicable, or to use the system default in all other cases. System default - This option will cause IBrowse² to use the character set specified in the AmigaOS® 4.0 Locale settings. e.g. If your AmigaOS® 4.0 Locale is set to English ISO-8859-15, and the above setting is set to Webpage chooses. You visit a webpage that specifies the charset as ISO8859-16. IBrowse² will then try and open the desired font in the ISO8859-16 character set, and use it to display the webpage. If a suitable font is not available, IBrowse² (or more specifically diskfont.library) will open the font in the system default character set instead. Spoofing - The spoofing engine has been totally re-written for 2.4, and provides a range of pre-defined spoofing options. As before, they are controlled by the URL Prefs, but additionally they are also selectable from the Preferences menu as many people had requested. The available options for spoofing are:
IBrowse (compatible)¹ Spoofing simply means IBrowse will tell the querying webserver that it is one of the above browsers, which can often allow you to gain access to sites which would otherwise reject IBrowse, often for no valid reason. It does NOT mean that IBrowse will magically inherit the features of the browser it is spoofing, so setting it to Mozilla will not suddenly give it CSS support, and setting it to MSIE6.0 will not suddenly give it ActiveX support! ¹ These options are essentially the same, however in compatible mode, IB will report itself as IBrowse in the HTTP headers (and so in the server logs), but as Netscape when queried by JS during browser checks. This is handy if you wish to promote IBrowse/AmigaOS in server logs, whist remaining compatible with more sites checking for Netscape via JS. Standard mode will report IBrowse in both the HTTP headers, and when queried via JS. Compatible is the same mode that IBrowse 2.3 and below use. JavaScript Engine - JavaScript engine has been improved yet further providing support for more event handlers, and improved DOM support, along with some significant speed increases in certain areas. It now supports the complete JavaScript 1.6 extension, as found in Firefox 2.0, along with the majority of JavaScript 1.5 and the revision 3 of the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) specification. AmigaOS4 and MorphOS users will benefit from the native PPC implementations, providing a further speed increase. Furthermore, due to the increase in use of the SiteCatalyst tracking code being employed by many websites such as PayPal, and packed jQuery being used on sites such as Sourceforge, an option to block known slow JavaScript code has been added to the preferences. Compressed Content - Support for compressed content has been added, which includes both gzip and deflate content. These methods allow webservers to send compressed pages to the browser to reduce bandwidth, but only if the browser can understand it to then decode it. As such, the transfer of compressed pages can be faster, although the display fractionally slower while its de-compressed. On plain HTML the overhead tends to be very low, but support for both the compression formats can be disabled in the prefs. Cookies & Cache - The cookies are no longer stored in the cache partition, and are now saved to the PROGDIR: when IBrowse is exited. This means if you point your cache to RAM: you will no longer loose the cookies saved after the session. Additionally, the cache has at long last been fixed so that it can be entirely disabled - yes Off now really means Off! Switching cache location whilst running IBrowse will now also relocate the cache during the session, rather than after when you exit IBrowse. As a result, this can cause IBrowse to seemingly pause after loading a new prefs file which has a different cache location, or when altering the cache location manually and 'OK'-ing the prefs. Form Password Saving - On websites which ask for a username and password in a HTML based form, IBrowse can now (optionally) save these details for future visits. The option is fairly basic, and can be enabled in the HTML prefs. Once done so, you will be asked if you wish to save the details on any forms which consist of one user field, and one password field. Forms which require extra data or just a password will not be able to save the data. Should you change the username or password on a form which has been saved already, IBrowse will prompt you to re-save the data should you wish to, over writing the previously saved information. Master Password - The Password Manager has also been improved to allow encryption of the username/password pairs for websites requiring HTTP Authentication, as well as form based username/password logins. When you set a Master Password in the Password Manager, you will be prompted once per session for the master password to enable IBrowse to decrypt the saved username/password pairs. The request for the Master Password will be shown the first time IBrowse needs to decrypt the details, so if you do not visit any sites requiring access to the saved data during a particular session, you will not be asked for the information. WACL - Web Advert Control Language is a feature of IBrowse² based on a proposal by Stefan Stuntz for a user configurable, flexible scripting language to control the display of adverts on webpages. The WACL configuration file is a plain text file, which is located at s:wacl.conf. In order to manipulate the display of advertising, various configuration options are available for use within the file, which makes it very flexible. The configuration file should be structured with one entry per line, which starts with an option, and is followed by one or more of the keywords. Lines beginning with a ; or # will be treated as comments and ignored. The file must start with the version ID line to distinguish to IBrowse² what options are available to it: $VER: WebAdvertismentsControlSystemV1.0 Options:
LINK=URL
URL=URL
PAGEURL=URL Keywords: HIDEIMAGES/S - This switch is used to specify that IBrowse² should not show any images or any indication that the images even exist, when the page is displayed. DELAYIMAGES/S - This switch is used to specify that IBrowse² should not show any images, but should show an empty image frame to indicate an image was not loaded. HIDEEMBEDS/S - This switch is used to specify that IBrowse² should not show any object included on the page via and |