Classilla 9.1

Letting Classilla bake a couple more weeks isn't likely to make it any better,

so I'm releasing 9.1 today.

I was unhappy with some of the bugs that snuck into 9.0.4, some of them not

in portions of code I used much, but others I should have noticed, and a

few of those regressions were serious. I've tried to avoid doing that in 9.1

and the most important regressions I introduced in 9.0.4 are now fixed. I am

not fully happy with 9.1, but I think it is an important enough update to

release even in its current form and I apologize to the community for not

having beaten on 9.0.4 more before I released it. 9.1 is what 9.0.4 should

have been.

9.1 is primarily a layout update. I managed to find a fix for infamous issue

65 that prevented layout from advancing further, and was able to restore the

overflow branch. This layout update handles overflow space management much

more correctly, which is an opaque way of saying that the blank spaces you

see on a lot of sites in 9.0.4 will now be properly filled with content. In

fact, 68KMLA renders right for the first time in any Mozilla-based browser

on the classic Mac OS. This also means the dreadful experimental renderer

hack is no longer needed, and has been removed. There are other minor layout

fixes. These don't work 100% on all the pages that used to -- in particular

Apple's nav bar gets "ghosted" for reasons I can't figure out -- but the

number of sites that now work greatly outnumbers the ones that work less.

Also, widget and view code have been revamped to avoid a number of the

scrolling and graphical glitches that plagued 9.0.x. Many of the "scroll

turd" bugs have been quashed by the overpainting scroller in this release.

This makes scrolling a bit slower, but makes the display much higher quality.

For the few sites that can't scroll correctly at all, there is a View > Use

Slow Scroll which forces additional repaints (but is also slower still,

as the name would suggest). Those sites are rare.

Plugins can also now be disabled completely, which reduces a common source

of display instability (turn off plugins if you don't have Flash).

Finally, a few sites that hit worst-case scenarios during reflow now have a

mitigation. While the sites will still appear to hang the browser, you can

abort layout by holding down Cmd-. (Command-Period) and come to a safe halt

without force quitting. This may cause the page to not fully lay out, but you

can navigate on it, and the operation is safe and requires no restart. Paypal

comes to mind here.

Just as 9.0.4 was mostly a JavaScript update, so will 9.2. However, I really

just need to rewrite it from scratch, and we'll talk more about that when test

versions become available. 9.3 will be the next layout update, but I have to

think about how to accomplish it. Despite being still mostly Mozilla code,

Clecko has patches applied in different order and different ways, and it is

getting harder to port arbitrary Mozilla code to it. It's still possible, but

harder. However, a lot of porting will be needed to get a later Mozilla layout

into Classilla, let alone everything else, and it may not even work. I have

to weigh the best way to accomplish that.

Right now, though, you can get it as always from www.classilla.org

and have fun.

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