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Classilla 9.1

ClassicHasClass

ClassicHasClass

68000
I posted this to the macos9 list, but I'll also post it here. Obviously, you can get it from www.classilla.org. 68kMLA finally renders correctly!

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.
Click to expand...
 
Thank you a lot.

Your work fills a great hole in mac os classic today usability.

All mac classics users must be gratefull.

Sorry for my english.

 
Thanks! I'm checking it out now and posting from my B&W running 9.2.2. It's so cool to see a modern forum render correctly under Mac OS 9. My machine doesn't feel so old now :lol: . Thanks for all the work you're putting into this.

 
Just downloaded and installed the latest version. Everything seems to work better so far. I can load FaceBook on my G3 without using the mobile site, and sites seem to all around load faster.

 
ClassicHasClass, You are THE MAN! Your efforts are highly appreciated! Thank You!

JavaScript next!
Click to expand...
Please, please! It drives me nuts that I can't navigate normally on some sites, especially eBay.

I am still on all sorts of Classic and won't be switching to OsX anytime soon. Only if the bastards will force me to.

The beauty of the Macintosh for me is the possibility to 'throw together" the operating sistem by combining CP's and extensions and not going to any sort of command line. Wasn't that the main feature that made computing so understandable to millions of people?

OK, enough, I'll rant about that resorce hungry GUI on top of the Unix somewhere else :-D

ojfd

 
Cheers! This is terrific. I only discovered Classilla about two weeks ago, and I love it. You have our gratitude!

What macos9 list?

 
Great!

Yesterdays Youtube "layout change" killed youtube usage in Classilla. Even if they call it only a "layout change" it made all my Classilla setups to be unable to playback any video! Did someone already find out if there is a way to go on watching youtube videos?

 
I seen to recall reading a popup thing from them(or possibly elsewhere) about cutting backward compatibility.

 
OK, I uploaded an screenshot here: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/0c3de1af1c.jpg

(BTW ImageShack is also not working anymore because of an "javascript: void(0)")

The problem at Youtube seems to be ugly javascripts. It´s a similar problem whith all embedded videos since years (wamcom and Netscape 7). The control buttons are not acessable at all. The flash content is not displayed. If I reload the page or scoll, it´s possible to see the original size of the video window inside tha youtube page, but the video window gets too big - independend from the page size. So I did an screenshot in 1600 x 1200 to understand what I mean. No control button is availaible, no further informations inside this video window down to "category" and "tags" which never fit inside the actual window size! Maybe one problemm is that "" tag? But I don´t understand much about it.

Another intersting thing, I can nowhere see a link while mouseover - even if i can access some parts of the new page by clicking inside this black video window, ...

 
Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that this is just a JavaScript problem -- in Camino 1.6.11 (1.8.1.23) the page also lays out very badly, despite (nearly) up to date JavaScript. I think this is primarily a layout issue, and that's going to be very hard to repair because the layout upgrade I'm envisioning for 9.3 at best gets to 1.8.1 also (1.7.13 plus non-Cairo patches). I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to fix this for awhile. However, does destyling the page help you at all?

 
Thanks for your quick reply! Destyling doesn´t help anything. The video will also not load and not be shown at all, and not be controllable (no control buttons etc.)

Maybe there is something doable with the iPhone version? But I don´t know if the mpg4 versions used for mobile safari are decodeable with MacOS 9 at all?

So thanks again for your efforts! Be sure I know about your work for MacOS 9. I´m angry at that company which is able to kick us - with a simple "layout change" - back to where we´ve been with Mozilla 1.2, ...

 
OS 9 doesn't (natively) do MPEG-4. I might be able to remedy this in the not so distant future however :)

That being said, interestingly enough, if I disable JavaScript and load the page it (almost) appears normally, except the plugin is not loaded. When I destyle the page with JavaScript on, however, I *do* see the plugin frame. Can you post a screenshot of that so I can see what you're seeing? Does that plugin frame not work either?

A while ago when I was working on 9.0.4 I had an idea for "agents" for troublesome sites on a case-by-case basis that acted as helpers when the browser itself was unable to handle the content. The helpers would pull links and content out of the page and give basic functionality (so in this case, pulling out the embedded video links so you could at least download the video, even if you couldn't do anything else). This is not a road I want to go down because then I end up writing up a huge batch of exceptions instead of fixing core problems, but it might be what we have to do in the interim.

 
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