Ibrowse 2.5 will be demoed at AmiWest 2017. While some features are only for OS4 port, many advanced features (to Ibrowse 2.4) will remain in 68k port too. EXTERNAL LINK IBrowse 2.5 is breaking cover... Some of you may be lucky enough to see it being demo'd at the upcoming AmiWest and Amiga32 shows. Obviously we realise not everyone can get to these shows, so we have added a summary of the news here. Screenshots and more details will follow at a later date. To get the bad news out of the way first, IBrowse 2.5 isn't available yet, and is unlikely to be in 2017. However, we are working hard on finalising things for release, including making keys available for purchase again, to coincide with the 2.5 release. Originally, IBrowse 2.5 was supposed to mainly be the OS4 port of IBrowse 2.4, but obviously many years have since passed and many other changes have been made. Summary of the new features: OS4 Native Version Added (OS4.1 Final Edition Required) AmiSSL v4 Support MUI 4.0 and 5.0 Support Alpha Channel Support (OS4) 4Gb+ File/Downloads (OS4) OpenSearch Support Summary of the re-written features: TextEditField Text Editor Disk Cache Clean Up Summary of the improved features: JavaScript Engine HTML Engine HTTP Engine Password Manager Cookie Support Various GUI Elements Internal Image Decoders Memory Management Bug Fixes IBrowse 2.5 Features New Features OS4 Native Version Added (OS4.1 Final Edition Required) In addition to the OS3 68k version of IBrowse, an OS4 PPC native version will also be available. This is not a simple port, but we have taken great care to ensure it fully utilises of all the relevant new features avaiable in OS4 and as such requires a minimum of OS4.1 Final Edition. Uses the new graphics.library RTG system, dropping CyberGraphX support completely. Other features include faster image rendering using hardware compositing, anti-aliased text rendering and proper daylight saving time handling. AmiSSL v4 Support Support for the latest AmiSSL release has been added to IBrowse 2.5, allowing the use of the most up to date SSL implementation (OpenSSL 1.1.x) available for AmigaOS. Whilst this adds support for TLS1.2 (and TLS1.3 in the future) and latest ciphers, we have also dropped SSLv2 and SSLv3 support completely (including MiamiSSL). SNI (Server Name Information) support has be added for HTTPS. Certificate verification has been added, which prompts the user when necessary, to protect against "Man in the Middle" vulnerabilities. OS4 users will be able to benefit from the improved speed of the PPC native SSL implementation, including specific PPC speed optimisations and AltiVec acceleration, and other AmigaOS compatible systems will be able to use the 68k implementation. The AmiSSL Open Source Team are still looking for somebody to handle the MorphOS build of AmiSSL v4 - no MorphOS developers have volunteered. MUI 4.0 and 5.0 Support IBrowse 2.5 will still work with MUI 3.8 (although, we recommend 3.9 as a minimum), we have added support for new features in 4.0 and 5.0. This includes using MUI's context sensitive pointers instead of our own which were introduced in IBrowse 2.4, support for various built-in MUI menus and other new GUI additions. Alpha Channel Support on >= 15-bit Displays (OS4) Alpha channels in images are now fully supported and displayed properly on non-colourmapped displays. 4Gb+ File/Downloads (OS4) The OS4 version of IBrowse 2.5 is able to properly support handling and downloading of files bigger than 2Gb, with all status information now capable of displaying sizes larger than 4Gb. OpenSearch Support IBrowse 2.5 now supports the OpenSearch standard allowing search engines to automatically be added to the search bar. This is in addition to the older Sherlock/Mycroft search engine support available in IBrowse 2.4, Rewritten Features. TextEditField Text Editor IBrowse's TextEditField object has had an overhaul, fixing various issues and adding new features. Rendering is done in a more MUI4/5 compatible manner allowing these objects to inherit your MUI settings. Your mousewheel can now be used for scrolling and various MUI defined keyboard shortcuts are now honoured. Disk Cache Clean Up This is really a new feature, albeit not an exciting one, as the disk cache clean up menu item never used to do anything. Now it actually will erase all unused items, starting afresh, avoiding the need for you to manually delete the disk cache via a file manager. There have also been a few fixes to the disk cache, during day to day operation, to prevent old files being left untracked there. Improved Features. JavaScript Engine JavaScript engine has been improved yet further, with various improvements, bug fixes and crash fixes. HTML Engine The existing HTML4 engine has been enhanced, with improved support for more tags and attributes, as well as being compatible with more sites. Redraw speeds of background images containing transparency has been greatly improved. HTTP Engine Various fixes and improvements, making IBrowse compatible with more servers. Now also supports the "Do Not Track" header, chunked transfer encoding and faster password protected sessions. Password Manager The password manager will now store FTP login information. Issues with setting a master password have been fixed along with a crash bug. Cookie Support The hardcoded 2000 global cookies, with a 200 per domain, limits introduced in IBrowse 2.4 are now adjustable in the preferences. An AmigaDOS pattern can also be used to automatically block certain cookies from being accepted. For the Cookie Manager window itself, real-time updating no longer slows everything down while browsing and columns are now click sortable. Various GUI Elements The background of browser tabs now uses your MUI "Groups / Tab groups / Container" setting. As a whole, IBrowse's GUI is more compatible with MUI 4.0 and 5.0 than previous versions of IBrowse. Internal Image Decoders All the internal image decoders have been improved, with various fixes, alpha channel handling, and speed optimisations. The JPEG and PNG decoders now fully utilise the decoding improvements and optimisations from the current Warp Datatypes, which also includes AltiVec acceleration in the JPEG decoder. Memory Management Further improvements to the memory management and usage, more memory leaks plugged Bug Fixes It perhaps goes without saying that many bugs, some minor, some crash inducing, have been fixed for IBrowse 2.5, making it the most stable version ever.
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