NetSurf 2.9 available

NetSurf 2.9 has been released. This release contains many bug fixes and improvements.

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

The focus for NetSurf 2.9 has been on performance. The most significant changes are new multi-tasking behaviour, optimised URL handling, fetcher optimisations, cache optimisations, and faster CSS selection.

A complete list of changes is given below.

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

 * 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-specific
 ----------------

 * 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.

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

Having read about NetSurf 2.9 yesterday (on Arcsite) I’ve been quite suprised how I missed that one. Really like the favicons btw and the other enhancements of course. Big thanks!