Over the past few weeks I've been able to spend time contributing to open-source projects at work.
Codethink [1] values open-source software, and so I was approved to work on NetSurf and related components while I was between projects. I'd like to thank Codethink for this opportunity, which I very much value and appreciate. What follows is a summary of the development I've been able to accomplish during this time. [1] http://www.codethink.co.uk/ LibCSS (CSS parsing and selection library) ========================================== * Added parsing and selection support for the CSS3 box-sizing property. NetSurf ======= Core: HTML layout engine ------------------------ * Added support for the CSS3 box-sizing property. This helps us assign element widths and heights as the web page author intended. * Extended :after pseudo element handling to cover the table display type. This improves layout of pages that use a variant of the clearfix CSS trick for clearing floats. * Fixed the handling of the CSS min-width and max-width properties to correctly affect the auto-width left and right margins. * Added support for width attribute on HR element. * Fixed use of uninitialised value in CSS presentational hint handling, that had potential to reduce the likelihood of computed style sharing. * Improved layout tree dump, to make debugging layout problems easier. Core: Content handling ---------------------- * Improved logging, making it easier to track HTML contents through a session, for debug purposes. * Removed bogus assertion in the HTML object fetch handler, which would sometimes crash the browser. * Fixed bug in content state machine, which made aborted fetches cause their contents to get stuck in the cache. This would happen on JavaScript location assignments. Core: URL handling ------------------ * Improved file: URL handling. * Removed redundant code. * Improved hexadecimal handling. * Improved test suite. Core: Hotlist (bookmarks/favourites) ------------------------------------ * Added support for saving the hotlist automatically after entries are added or removed. This helps prevent loss of hotlist changes if NetSurf is unable to save the file on exit. * Added support for read-only hotlist mode, which can be selected by frontend code. In this mode, the hotlist file may be read, and the hotlist updated, but changes are never saved to disc. GTK frontend ------------ * Fixed bug where different pango layout contexts were used for measuring and painting text, which in some situations caused either lines with overlapping text, or large spaces between bits of text on a line. * Slight optimisation to the text line break handling code. * Rewrote bitmap rendering plotter. The new implementation is many times faster for tiled rendering, such as for repeating background images, and simplifies the handling of scaled plots. RISC OS frontend ---------------- * Improved handling of external hotlist managers, by setting the core hotlist to read-only mode, when configured to use an external manager. NetSurf's JavaScript engine (Duktape) ===================================== NetSurf uses the excellent Duktape JavaScript engine. URL: http://www.duktape.org/ * Updated NetSurf and nsgenbind (our JavaScript binding generator) from Duktape 1.6 to Duktape 2.0. We had been stuck on the 1.X series due to API changes in Duktape 2, and lack of time to make the transition. Duktape 2.0 provides greater performance, amongst many other improvements. * Added support for HTML style comments (ES6 spec) to Duktape and upstreamed it to the Duktape author, Sami Vaarala. This feature had been requested by our users. * Updated NetSurf from Duktape 2.0 to the recently released Duktape 2.1, which gives further performance gains, adds the HTML stlye comment handling, and other improvements. * On the advice of the Duktape author, enabled Duktape's fastint build option, for faster integer arithmetic. LibNSGIF (GIF decoding library) =============================== * Complete rewrite of LZW decompression. The new implementation is both 30% faster and cleaner code. It also now handles LZW codes that span three sub-blocks. (Although these are unlikely to actually appear in the real world.) LibSVGTiny (SVG decoding library) ================================= * Build system improvements to fix warnings about use of gperf-generated code. Cheers, Michael
