Arora development

Arora 0.11.0!

2010-09-27T04:41:00.003+02:00

Packages are available on arora-browser.org.

Over the past ten months Arora has received a small but steady trickle of commits. With the release of Qt 4.7.0 the current Arora 0.10.2 can not be compiled with the current Qt* so it was time to package up the current source in Git into a release.

Enjoy!

* due to the addition of a define in QtWebKit that already existed in Arora.

Changelog:

Interface:
When the privacy indicator is visible clicking on it will result in private mode being turned off.
Add a way to modify the user agent string from within the application.
Support arguments for the external download program
Tweak the adblock dialog spacing and size.
Change the AdBlock dialog to use a simple check box instead of a group box.
Replace Stopped with Download Complete (like in ffx it's less confusing )
Update the copyright year in the about dialog to include 2010
Issue: 768: Fix spelling mistake
Issue: 821: Sort columns in cookie dialog by data values instead of string value. This fixes the dates being alphanumerically sorted.

Behind the scene:
Issue: 891: Fix Text Encoding to work correctly
Issue: 826: Correctly save the history state of a tab when using Qt 4.6
Fix build breakage with QtWebKit 2.0.
Remove remnant of delayed QWebView creation. Fixes tab restore again.
Style fix: convert tabs to spaces.

Build system:
Add an application icon for os2.
For finding the locale tools on os2 behave like win32
When building in debug mode on OS2 just like with Windows enable the console.
Move Arora's hooks to the git-hooks format to utilize git-hooks (See: http://github.com/icefox/git-hooks)
Default to lrelease and not lrelease-qt4 on non unix platforms.
QMAKE_EXTRA_UNIX_TARGETS is deprecated; use QMAKE_EXTRA_TARGETS instead.
Enable the raster graphics system by default for X11

Translation:
Make "Show Hidden Files" translatable.
Issue: 811: Fix typos in the German translation
Replaced "leichtgewichtiger" with "schlanker" in translation with source "Lightweight WebKit-based wen browser"
Fixed capitalization typo whare the word "Tab" began with a lowercase "t"
Renamed Dutch translation file from nl_BE to nl.

Contributions:

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Christopher Eby kreed@kreed.org

Kristof Bal kristof.bal@gmail.com

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

John Wimer john@god.vtic.net

Benjamin Poulain benjamin.poulain@nokia.com

William Witt unamanic@gimli.tolkien

Tor Arne Vestbø tor.arne.vestbo@nokia.com

Popa Marius Adrian mapopa@gmail.com

mwenge robert@roberthogan.net

Michael Burger linuxman2k1@yahoo.com

Max Kueng me@maxkueng.com

João Abecasis joao@abecasis.name

Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com

Henri Valta cg@jakorasia.info

Ariya Hidayat ariya.hidayat@gmail.com

Andreas Kling andreas.kling@nokia.com

Arora on os2

2010-08-27T01:48:00.000+02:00

The group over at netlabs.org has ported Qt4 to OS2. Along with that they have got QtWebKit building on OS2 and now have an Arora on OS2 binary you can download. With a few minor build related fixes (now in git) to Arora it now builds out of box and can be run on OS2.

Arora 0.10.2!

2009-12-06T00:01:00.006+01:00

Packages are available on arora-browser.org.

Over the past year when compiling with Qt 4.6 Arora had been using a number of new API's. Shortly before 4.6.0 was released all the new API's went through several rounds of API reviews and were improved. Shortly after the changes were made Arora's code has been updated to reflect the new api. This is also why 0.10.1 doesn't build on the older Qt 4.6 release candidate for those who have seen that build errors. With Qt 4.6.0 released there is the need for a new minor package of Arora that includes updates to the final Qt 4.6 api and I included one segfault fix. The changelog is nice and small :)

Changelog:
- Fix build breakage due to final API changes in Qt 4.6.0
- A segfault that could occur when opening a URL on a new window from the command-line.

I also though I should try to list some of the new features users will be getting once they upgrade to Qt 4.6.0 (Arora needs to be compiled against 4.6 also)

In Arora itself:
- The about dialog will now include the webkit version (532.4 in Qt 4.6.0 btw)
- On KDE you will find icons in the menu's
- Adblock will hide element's that are blocked
- The history of the back and forward buttons will be saved across sessions and when you re-open a closed tab.
- Javascript that is hanging the browser will be caught
- You can right click on any form and add it to the search box
- You can choose the default text encoding
- Use the keyboard to navigate links with Access keys
- The ability to highlight everything found when searching the page

In QtWebKit and Qt you will find many more updates that are worth talking about. QtWebKit has improved a lot in the last year. The rendering is a lot better, more tests are passing, using less memory, all new inspector features, and more. Qt's network has got an upgrade and includes pipelining, the ability to set the number of connections, and other improvements that make it faster. For more details checkout the Qt 4.6.0 changelog QtWebKit 4.6 feature wiki page

Enjoy!

QtWebKit and XSLT

2009-11-22T22:46:00.005+01:00

Qt 4.6 is getting closer and there is a couple of optional features in Arora that are only enabled when building against the upcoming version, most of which have been blogged about. These basically required specific APIs to be available in QtWebKit. There are, however, certain new things in QtWebKit that did not need any additional work in Arora itself and work out of the box when running Qt 4.6. One of them is basic XSLT support.

So far, QtWebKit did not have any support for XSLT. Other WebKit ports have been using the libxslt library to handle XSL transformations, but for QtWebKit such a dependency would not have been possible and the XSLT processor in WebCore had been disabled in the build system (it didn't even compile). But since Qt developed its own XSLT processor in the QtXmlPatterns module, it's been possible to make QtWebKit use that. After a bit of abstraction work, the main patch landed in r48826.

Here is the other side of the medal: the set of XSLT features that are supported in QtWebKit supports corresponds to what is available in QtXmlPatterns, which is quite limited. Most of websites, which make use of XSLT to e.g. transform XML to a human-readable XHTML document, will most likely not work properly. This is, however, a good starting point towards better website compatibility. And at least most of the W3C Schools examples work just fine:

Before:

After:

Haiku Qt Port

2009-10-28T01:37:00.003+01:00

Over on OS News there is a story about Qt 4 being ported to Haiku and has a nice screenshot of Arora running. There is even a package you can download and try out. Looking at the screenshot there are various things in the style that are falling back to the Qt default, no doubt as time goes by the port will be improved and Qt applications including Arora will integrate better and better with the desktop. Congratulations on the new port!

Arora 0.10.1!

2009-10-05T05:25:00.003+02:00

Packages are available on arora-browser.org.

Two major issues combined with some late translations resulted in several evenings concentrating on fixing bugs that could go in a .1 release. The results of which are Arora 0.10.1. Enjoy!

0.10.1
The major issues:
Issue 666: Some sites like https://mail.yahoo.com were showing a "SSL handshake failure". With the new NetworkAccessManagerProxy the signals were being sent to the proxy and not the primary networkaccessmanager.
Issue 683: Arora crashes when using privacy mode.
When switching to private mode the primary networkaccessmanagers swaps cookiejar's which caused a segfault. Introduce a CookieJarProxy class which will pass the cookie requests to the primary networkaccessmanager's cookiejar.

Translations:
Add Portuguese translation from Américo Monteiro
Updated Turkish translation from Mehmet Nur Olcay
Issue 682,677: Fix several FR spelling mistakes.

Fixed Issues:
Issue 79: Only tab down the completer when the popup is visible.
Issue 221: When using Qt 4.6 hardcode a webpage to have a white background even when using a dark theme.
Issue 472: Set the url on the location bar that matches the webview that we are loading the url in, not in the current location bar which might not be the correct one.
Issue 637: Startup Crash with Qt 4.5.0 (not with any other Qt version)
Issue 679: Selecting Show only one close button instead of one for each tab requires an application restart to be applied.
Issue 676: Fix openstreetmap.org's login saving and improve the Wallet password dialog when finding the login name.
Rather than using the document.form[0].name use document.form[0].elements["name"] this allows the name to contain things such as []'s without causing a problem.

Arora 0.10.0!

2009-10-02T03:39:00.004+02:00

Source and Windows binary packages (with Qt 4.5.3) are available on arora-browser.org. OS X binaries will be up later tonight. Kubuntu/Ubuntu users will find packages in Karmic shortly.

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

Diego Iastrubni elcuco@kde.org

Christopher Eby kreed@kreed.org

Kristof Bal kristof.bal@gmail.com

Tor Arne Vestbø tor.arne.vestbo@nokia.com

Tom Gundersen teg@jklm.no

John Wimer john@god.vtic.net

Jocelyn Turcotte jocelyn.turcotte@nokia.com

Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com

Gegesy Zsombor gzsombor@gmail.com

Christian Franke cfchris6@ts2server.com

axasia axasia@gmail.com

0.10.0 has a lot of improvements, many of which have been blogged about the past few weeks. The biggest two are the addition of AdBlock and password saving / wallet. While browsers like Konqueror and Opera let the user block things manually, Arora might be the first browser to ship with a subscription blocking system and not as an extra install. [See below were a user will comment about the browser that had adblock subscriptions all the way back in the 90's] These days many browsers are funded by companies that are ad based in one form or another such as Firefox and Chrome who are funded by Google. As Arora is not funded by an ad based company we can happily incorporate features like ad blocking and Flash blocking to give our users what they want while Firefox and Chrome can never add those features.

We went through and implemented a lot of older issues. For those of you with Google accounts the issues are sorted by the number of stars a issue has so if you find a bug/feature important click the star on the left to vote for it so we know what you find important.

After getting directory listing in the last release we got a nice little patch that adds the ability to hide and show hidden files when browsing a directory.

Two older feature requests, #40 and #85 add support for keyboard shortcuts on the location bar such as ctrl-enter to append .com. If there are keyboard shortcuts that you expected Arora to have, but did not find open a issue and we will see what we can do.

The full changelog:

0.10.0
Interface
- Issue #24: Add support for AdBlock
- Issue #40: Support several common modifiers in the location bar for modifying the typed in url.
ctrl-enter - append .com
ctrl-shift-enter - append .org
shift-enter - append .net
- Issue #79: Trap tab key to cycle through potential URLs in the location bar.
- Issue #85: Alt+Enter on the location bar opens the url in a new tab.
- Issue #119: Add Password Management / AutoFill
- Issue #411: Save and restore the tab back/forward history
- Issue #630: Limit download progress updates to 5 per second to reduces CPU use from 18% to 3% when downloading.
- Issue #650: Save the toolbar location allowing the toolbars to be next to each other
- Add ctrl-z shortcut to undo the closing of the last tab.
- Behave better when access keys are enabled by adding a slight delay to make sure that the ctrl is actually for access keys and not for another shortcut such as ctrl-tab or ctrl-a
- When arora crashed on the previous startup give the user a way to bypass the failsafe and restore their session if they really want.
- Add the ability to set the length of a session cookie
- Enable DNS prefetching and WebKit version in the about dialog when building against Qt 4.6.
- Remember what tab you were on when you close the settings dialog
- Add a browse button next to the style sheet line edit to help users find files and automatically translate them into url's.
- Add icons to the menu actions on freedesktop systems.
- Show the configure search engines action in the tools menu
- Change default bookmarks to only have a link to htpp://arora-browser.org
Removed all of Qt development type entries
From discussion on http://arorabrowser.blogspot.com/2009/08/arora-090.html and also the Kubuntu guys strip the bookmarks in their release so it make sense.
- Move the Preferences menu item to Tools/Options
- Set placeholder text for the start page search box
- Add a checkbox to hide/show hidden files in the directory listing.
- Change the about dialog text so it can be selected with a mouse so users can copy the application version.
- Allow urls to be dropped on the bookmark bar and bookmark menu

Behind the scenes
- Force the history completer to be LTR: same as the url line.
- Create a new stills class, NetworkAcessManagerProxy that is useful for tracking what QWebPage a QWebReply came from.
- Load QWebView settings when the View is created so m_enableAccessKeys will be read from settings
- Rename lineedit -> locationbar functions & variables
- Enhance SingleApplication so that the host can send messages back to the second application.
On Windows this is used to send the window id back to the application that was just started
so it can raise the arora window to the front.
- Fix some old MSVC compile warnings
- Make it possible to retranslate the bookmarks toolbar title
- Set the maximumPagesInCache to 3 (default is 0) and provide a way for users to set this value through QSettings.
- Add a path from the users directory to the locale search path
- Added RTL support for the start page
- Add support for multiple directories to LanguageManager.
- Fix the naming of the QAction m_toolsEnableInspector to m_toolsEnableInspectorAction to be consistent with the rest of the code
- Add new TreeSortFilterProxyModel class to utils that will only filter child nodes in a QAbstractItemModel. (under the BSD license)
- Rename getConfigFile to dataFilePath
- Rename dataDirectory to installedDataDirectory to give a much better description of what it does
- Add missing drop functionality to the ModelMenu class. The implementation is symetric to the ModelToolBar class.
- ModelMenu can now accept drops (both moving and copying) and can apply them to the underlying model.
- Refactor BookmarksToolBar by making it inherit from ModelToolBar.
- Add new ModelToolBar class, that is a subclass of QToolBar and an equivalent of ModelMenu for toolbars. It can be used to populate a toolbar with actions based on a given model.
- Fix character encoding in directory listing.
- Clean up the private browsing message box to make it easier to translate.

Build system
- Allow building against a shadow-built WebKit trunk
- Ignore more misc generated build files on windows
- Add Git hook to check commits for the proper copyright year
- Ignore the doc directory which is generated by doxygen
- Check for spaces at the start and end of an expression
- Re-enable sharing the temporary compilation objects for all subprojects. Use the 'ordered' configuration to make sure that we walk through the subdirectories one by one and not all simultaneously when building in parallel.

AdBlock

2009-09-28T12:00:00.007+02:00

This past week the adblock branch was finally merged into Arora's master branch. A way to block content was one of the first issues opened (issue #24) and was the issue with the most stars/votes. After a lot of work and research the end results speaks for itself.

A big thanks goes out to Zsombor Gegesy who did a lot of initial development and through his efforts we learned a fair amount about what was needed and what solutions users would not accept. While various browsers have had systems for blocking content the Adblock Plus FireFox plugin has really set the standard for what users expect. A primary feature of Adblock Plus has been the idea of a subscription. Arora's AdBlock attempts to be compatible to the current Adblock Plus system and system supports subscribing to Adblock Plus subscriptions (even supporting abp:// links) and the Adblock Plus rule set.

Adblock is two different blocking systems. The first is network and blocks the downloading of content. The second is about hiding/removing items on the web page. Qt 4.5 users will get the network side in the next Arora release, but for the dom manipulation we currently use QWebElement which is part of 4.6 (if someone wants to make a patch to do this in Javascript the patch would be accepted). Currently the AdBlock in Arora is very simple, but it is enough to be usable and to get feedback on so it was merged in. By default AdBlock is not enabled, but can be easily enabled through the Tools/AdBlock dialog. The major missing features are:

The list of items blocked on the current page wasn't ready to be merged in before the string freeze so it will be in the next release.
A few AdblockPlus Rule options are not yet supported.
When you right click to block something on a webpage it does not show a nice wizard, but just ads the url to the custom rule list.

If you are interested in helping out on these or other AdBlock feature in Arora stop by #arora on irc.freenode.net. All of the AdBlock code in Arora is released under the BSD license and we welcome contributions from other projects that would like to share this feature in their QtWebKit project.

AdBlock will be part of the next Arora release 0.10.0 which will be released Wednesday night / Thursday morning. If you want to help and contribute a translation make sure to submit it before Wednesday.

Saving Passwords

2009-09-24T03:41:00.009+02:00

An early feature request has been for the ability to save passwords so you don't have to re-type in your user name and password all the time when you login to websites. This evening I merged in the autofill branch which add this functionality to Arora. When you log into a website it will ask you if you want to save the form. Then when you go back to that website it will automatically fill in the form for you.

The patch is really just the start of this feature. At the moment it simply saves forms to a file in the Arora data directory, but going forward it would be good to hook into the existing wallets and at least on Linux there is talk of a FreeDesktop.org dbus spec so we would use KWallet or GnomeKeyRing depending on the desktop we are logged into. Also this feature fully works in Qt 4.5 so everyone can start using it immediately.*

While investigating this feature I discovered that for many users they didn't necessarily want a password manager, but they needed the browser to behave better with how they browsed. When a user logs into most sites the authentication cookie is a session cookie and until they restart their browser they are logged in. This creates two problems:

1) Users that frequently have to restart their browser (such as when I am hacking on QtWebKit) have to re-login over and over even though they logged in just five or ten minutes before. Even with a wallet this is very annoying.

2) Users who have browsers open for a very long time (weeks!) have session cookies that pile up and are never deleted.

For those users I have added the ability to specify what a cookie session is.

*And in the far future when we drop 4.5 we can convert a bunch of large ugly javascript into nice simpler QWebElement code :)

Icons In the Menu's

2009-09-22T23:48:00.001+02:00

One of the things that I heard when asking how to improve the KDE4 integration was that without icons in the menus it didn't look like a KDE application. Happily in Qt 4.6 there is a collection of new functions that have been added to QIcon. In particular QIcon::fromTheme() was the function I needed to populate Arora's menus with the correct icons from the current KDE and Gnome theme.

KDE:

Gnome:

Restoring Back/Forward History

2009-09-22T05:17:00.007+02:00

When Arora restores the last session (either as the selected preference on startup or selecting the action from the history menu) Arora will load the urls in the tabs, but will doesn't load the back/forward history. The same also happens when you restore the last closed tab (ctrl-t-shift) or re-open one of the previous closed tabs from the history menu. This was feature request 411 and while QtWebKit couldn't do it in the past QWebHistory just recently got two new functions: saveState() and restoreState() which make it possible to have this functionality and the webHistory branch was merged in today and will be part of the next release.

Hanging Javascript

2009-09-17T07:54:00.002+02:00

Occasionally you run across a web page that has some Javascript that can run for a long time, potentially hanging the browser. In Qt 4.6 there is a new function QWebPage::shouldInterruptJavaScript which by default pops up a dialog so the user can stop the JavaScript that is causing the issue. Of course no new feature blog is complete without a screenshot:

Arora 0.9.0!

2009-08-30T18:17:00.009+02:00

Source, Windows and OS X and binary packages are available on arora-browser.org.

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

Christopher Eby kreed@kreed.org

Zsombor Gegesy gzsombor@gmail.com

Alexandre Dupas alexandre.dupas@gmail.com

Tom Gundersen teg@jklm.no

Slim Amamou slim.amamou@gmail.com

Simon Hausmann simon@lst.de

Oscar Blumberg o.blumberg@robertlan.eu.org

ondrejcernos cernoso@gmail.com

Markus Goetz markus.goetz@nokia.com

John Wimer john@god.vtic.net

Dominik Riebeling bluebrother@gmx.de

axasia axasia@gmail.com

While 0.8.0 had many new features the majority of changes in 0.9.0 are bug fixes. There were several more features that were near completion, but the Arora policy is to only merge a branch when it is ready. Given that we the project has near monthly releases this isn't as harsh as other project such as KDE that have a six month release cycle. With a longer release cycles developers are likely to try to push in incomplete features near freeze deadlines just to have them in while with a short release cycle they are more willing to wait another month knowing that their branch will be more stable when the users get it. The hopeful result is a better application that is more stable and feature complete.

Apart from the dozens of bug fixes, there are a few significant improvements, one of which are long awaited search keywords which allow you to define a set of keywords for each search engine and then use them in the location bar, following them with the phrase that you want to search for. The screenshots should explain it better than any words:

Another notable change in this release was dropping support for Qt 4.4. Arora now requires Qt 4.5. The main reasons were:
- The QtWebKit version in 4.4 is significantly slower then the one today and does not include many features such as plugin (aka flash) support and many WebKit bug fixes.
- Supporting 4.4 was requiring more and more ifdef's as Arora has incorporated new features in Qt and QtWebKit.
- With KDE 4.3 requiring Qt 4.5 it is very likely that distributions will already have 4.5 (or will shortly).
- We really want to encourage QtWebKit application users to be using newer versions of QtWebKit (and thus Qt)

The full changelog:

0.9.0
Drop support for Qt 4.4.

Interface
FEATURES:
- Add support for search keywords in the location bar.
- POST support for OpenSearch suggestion requests.
- Add WebKit version to the About dialog [WebKit trunk only].
- Use HTTP pipelining for all network requests [Qt 4.6 only].

IMPROVEMENTS:
- Remember last used save directory.
- Added file dialog to download location settings.
- Restrict drag and drop to the same page unless a QWebView accepts it.
- Open an URL dropped on the tab bar as new tab or replace existing tab.
- Allow url to be dropped on the tab bar from other applications.
- Add a Select All action.
- Rather than not allowing setting or getting of any cookies in private mode create a blank cookie jar.
- Significantly speed up the cookie dialog by keeping a cached copy of all the cookies.
- Enhance the language manager to fallback to the country file if the country_language file doesn't exists.
- Add drag support for downloaded item in the download manager.
- Add Planet Qt to the default set of bookmarks.
- Remove the text wrapping option from the source viewer's menu and instead enable it by default.

BUGFIXES:
- Avoid duplicated and contradictory rules on the cookie rule list.
- Change the shortcut for showing the bookmark toolbar as it was conflicting with the show bookmark dialog shortcut.
- Encode the user input before inserting it into an URL template.
- Fix a crash when cloning a blank tab.
- When the widget losses focus hide the access keys.
- Fix detection of flash on various websites when ClickToFlash is used.
- Avoid an infinite recursion when asking the desktop to open an URL.
- When the download manager prevents the application from closing add a new tab when there are none.
- Only show the url completer if the user is typing a url.
- Always add the Inspect Element Action to the context menu when the developer extra tools are enabled.
- Bookmarklets were not working properly.
- Work around for a segfault in Qt 4.5.2 where you go into privacy mode while a QNetworkReply is still working.
- Clarify the networkdisk cache behavior in the messagebox.
- Start page: Reduce the top margin to 100px from so it fits on a netbook screen.
- Hide the bookmarks toolbar by default.
- Turn off cookie tracking filtering by default because it breaks sites like StackOverflow.com.
- Before clearing the cookie jar, load it so the exceptions and other settings are loaded.
- When removing cookies from the cookie jar via the cookie dialog notify the autosaver.
- When receiving a drop event on a bookmark folder, make sure that we don't drop a child bookmark.
- Avoid overwriting the user agent string in the WebPage autotest.
- Fix non-ASCII characters displayed garbled for Authors.

Behind the scenes
- Merge two blocks of code that deals with oneCloseButton policy.
- Make parentWindow() prettier.
- Simplify updates of actions in view menu.
- Save the window state when toggling the menu bar.
- Save UI changes in the active window before creating a new one.
- Move all network related files into one directory.

Build system
- When building on osx use qmake -r.
- Ignore generated files built on windows.

WebKit Version

2009-08-09T06:11:00.002+02:00

A missing feature of the QtWebKit API has been the ability to determine what version of WebKit you currently had. While you could parse it out of the user agent that was clumsy and in fact the version number in the user agent was hard coded into QtWebKit (and out of date!). Recently Robert Hogan wrote a patch for QtWebKit that not only properly determines the WebKit version, but also adds new API to QtWebKit to determine the values. This API will be part of Qt 4.6 and when building with WebKit trunk (and 4.6 once Qt master's copy of webkit is synced) Arora will show the current WebKit version in the about dialog.

QNX, WebKit, and Arora

2009-08-08T12:58:00.003+02:00

Recently on the Qt Labs blog Harald posted about a new port of Qt to QNX. On the blog there is a video where you can see QtWebKit rendering and today I got a email with a photo of Arora running on QNX. Because of Qt just like Arora builds on OS X, Windows, Linux and Embedded Linux Harald didn't have to make any changes to the code to build the binary. Although from the photo you can see that if for such a small device you would want to tweak the interface a bit or at least hide the toolbars and status bar from the view menu (which can also be hidden with ctrl-m).

Arora 0.8.0!

2009-07-20T19:12:00.001+02:00

Source, Windows and OS X and binary packages are available on arora-browser.org.

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Benjamin K. Stuhl bks24@cornell.edu

axasia axasia@gmail.com

Zsombor Gegesy gzsombor@gmail.com

Tom Gundersen teg@jklm.no

jreznik jreznik@redhat.com

Jonas Gehring jonas.gehring@boolsoft.org

Aurélien Gâteau agateau@kde.org

Shortly before 0.8.0 we had our 1000'th commit to Arora. A big thanks to everyone who helped make that possible.

Between 0.7.1 and today Qt 4.5.2 was release. There was a number of fixes in this release that effect Arora. For the complete list see the Qt 4.5.2 changelog Some highlights include:

A big QtWebKit Memory leak was fixed
Several QtWebKit security bugs were fixed
Several QtWebKit segfaults were fixed
Fixed a leak of file descriptors in QTemporaryFile::rename, introduced in 4.5.1. This was the bug that forced Arora to always turn off the disk cache when using Qt 4.5.1. With disk cache as you would expect Arora can perform much faster.
QNetworkCookie, Fixed parsing of multiple cookies separated by a newline (also introduced in 4.5.1). This is what broke many site logins such as facebook.

As you can see it is highly advisable to upgrade to Qt 4.5.2 on Linux if your distribution hasn't already. Both the Windows and OS X binary packages include Qt 4.5.2.

Lots of improvements and features were added in 0.8.0. We have been blogging about a number of the features, but here are two more:

In the current version of the Inspector you can now see the headers for a page. Because of this the Network monitor which was added just a little bit ago has been removed.

For those who still want to use the network monitor you can easily do it with git and revert 12ebaf4f60f804c0200a61e8fdbc62c935588184.

Another Qt 4.6 feature is the ability to highlight searches:

The full changelog:

0.8.0
Interface
FEATURES:
- When the ctrl key is pressed show keyboard accelerators on the screen. [Qt 4.6 only].
- Location bar: implement full text search and more accurate sorting.
- Add a simple start page with a search box pointing at the active search engine.
- Allow to create new open search engines from any input forms displayed in websites [Qt 4.6 only].
- Add a menu to set the default text encoding for all rendering [Qt 4.6 only].
- Implement directory listing when accessing file:/// URLs that point to directories.
- When a POST request is about to be resent, warn user about that fact to make sure that the operation is intended.
- Add a checkable push button to the search bar that allows to highlight a specific string in a website [Qt 4.6 only].
- Add a setting that specifies if the url supplied by the user should be forwarded to the default search engine if it isn't valid.

IMPROVEMENTS:
- Show a more verbose message when the htmlToXBel tool is not installed.
- Show the complete tab title as tool tip to improve GUI usability for long website titles.
- Download manager: Create the download directory as needed.
- Location bar: If escape is pressed on location bar revert to the original URL, this emulates the firefox behaviour.
- Add Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search engine to the default set.
- Drag & Drop: Add the ability to drop an url on the tab bar which will open it in a new tab.
- Drag & Drop: Allow dropping URLs on the location bar.
- When creating new windows, use the startup setting to decide if the homepage should be loaded.
- Remove the network monitor tool as the current Inspector now lets you see request headers and response headers.

BUGFIXES:
- Fix several memory leaks: set the Qt::WA_DeleteOnClose flag on dialogs that are executed asynchronously.
- Download manager: Fix displaying file size when downloading huge files.
- Download manager: Give correct name to downloaded files with no suffix.
- Location bar: Fix background color when using Oxygen style.
- Bookmarks manager: Don't allow to edit the url in any nodes but normal bookmarks.
- Private browsing now disables the disk cache.

Behind the scenes
- Added custom network scheme handlers, i.e. a single one for listing local directories.
- Add a setting so the user can swap the location of the new and close tab buttons.
- Add the ability for a user to specify the userAgent through QSettings.
- Split up the bookmarks classes into separate files.
- Remake the bookmarks toolbar.
- Clean up the AddBookmarkDialog class.
- OpenSearch: Implement the Referrer extension.
- Implement the WebPage::linkedResources() method using the DOM API.
- Tweak the certToFormattedString() function.
- OpenSearch: localization improvements.

Build system
- Include an additional XML file in the installation, which will make Arora appear in Gnome Control Center on the list of available web browsers that can be set as default.
- Add man pages for the tools.
- webkit.pri now supports building QtWebKit as a framework on mac.

Directory Listing

2009-07-18T11:54:00.000+02:00

For all network related tasks Arora uses QNetworkAccessManager Unfortunately it currently does not support a way to list directories out of the box in Qt 4.5. Because QNetworkAccessManager is used in other things besides browsers it isn't sure the proper way to return a directory listing. In our case we want to turn directory listings into a webpage that users can click on. We just recently merged a branch into Arora that gives us a way to overload the file scheme and generate a web page for local file browsing. Currently the page is very simple so if you know some html and javascript and would like to make it a bit fancier (such as adding a checkbox to show/hide hidden files) grab the current git, submit a new html file to the arora-dev mailinglist and we will merge it in.

Also this is the last call for translations before we release 0.8.0. If you would like to contribute a new translation or update an old one, do so asap to make the release.

Location Bar in 0.8

2009-07-08T13:22:00.001+02:00

Location bar is this part of Arora's GUI that has received the most care last weeks. Apart from the bug fixes that Ben blogged about yesterday and the location bar fallback feature that was mentioned two days ago, it will now have a way better autocompleter. Much thanks to Benjamin K. Stuhl, who is the author of completion improvements.

In previous releases the completer's matching algorithm was trivial and poor at once. First off, the old method was only matching URLs that were starting with what user has typed in the location bar. The completion results were sorted by recency, which wasn't bad but not sufficient.

Now it finally gives the user much more accurate completion results. The completer performs a full-text search of both URLs and page titles and sorts the results by a specific metric which is a combination of frequency and recency of visiting specific URLs. This way more interesting hits are at the top of the list. It also prioritizes full-word matches over random substrings so that e.g. "dot" matches "dot.kde.org" better than "slashdot.org".

Apart from the internal changes, the location bar autocompleter looks better now. It displays both URLs and titles of matched history entries in two columns.

Some Linux Desktop Improvements

2009-07-07T19:00:00.001+02:00

Recently a handful of fixes went in that help improve Arora across the Linux desktop. Highlighting a few of them:

LocationBar in KDE's Oxygen Style

In the current version when using Arora with Oxygen the background was painted outside of the line edit. Turns out this was a bug in Arora's LineEdit. After fixing that we look much better.

Default Browser in Gnome

Recently we got a patch that adds the xml file needed so show up in the Gnome preferred application dialog.

Man pages

Arora ships with some utility tools. I finally sat down and wrote up some man pages to ship with them when they are installed, resolving those Debian package warnings :).

Searching becomes even easier!

2009-07-06T12:32:00.011+02:00

Since 0.7 Arora has supported the OpenSearch format as description format for search engines, that can be used in the toolbar search. This gave you the ability to add new search engines to the default set as long as someone has created an XML file describing the search engine you would like to have and has put it up somewhere. But what if this isn't the case? What if you realize that there is no description file for your favourite search engine out there? 0.8 will address this problem. The bad news is that the feature described below can be used only when compiling Arora against Qt 4.6 or WebKit trunk.

Now you will be able to create a new search engine from a form that appears on a website. When you right-click on the input field, you'll notice a new option in the context menu:

Having clicked on the option, you'll be asked to choose a name for your new engine. And that's all. Now the new search engine will be available in the menu in the toolbar search:

There are two circumstances under which the above procedure will most likely fail:
- The search engine uses POST method - unfortunately search engines using POST aren't supported in Arora yet.
- The form is handled by some other JavaScript code before it is actually sent to the server - here the result is unexpected.

Another search-related feature that will be part of 0.8 is location bar fallback. If you type in a plain text in the location bar, it will be searched using the active search engine. It is configurable and disabled by default.

New Start Page

2009-07-05T21:37:00.004+02:00

After several Qt 4.6 features it is time to add a feature that everyone can enjoy. This weekend we merged in a new simple start page that Arora will use as the default home page starting in 0.8.0. A big thanks goes to Fernando Lemos who created it. The page is integrated with the search box using QtWebKit's Javascript bridge. This means that whatever you have currently selected in the search box will be used in the start page, i.e. Google is not hardcoded.

Please report any usability/design related suggestions.

Text Encoding

2009-07-04T21:16:00.002+02:00

One missing feature that QtWebKit has had (and Arora) has been the ability to set the text encoding. This feature ended up being relatively simple path to QtWebKit and has been added to QWebSettings. This API will be part of Qt 4.6 and for those running Arora against QtWebkit trunk or Qt-git you will now see a simple text-encoding menu.

Access Keys

2009-07-03T08:14:00.005+02:00

Over on planetkde.org (and on some KDE mailing lists) there is a bunch of discussion about web browsers and KDE. A common theme was that rather then talking about KHTML v.s. Webkit it you should just get out there and code. In that spirit I finished off my AccessKey branch and merged it in tonight. When you press the ctrl key little semi transparent boxes will appear all over the screen highlighting links. If you type the letter in the box that link will be followed. Using this it is much easier to browse without a mouse, not to mention faster. This was a feature that I really enjoyed using in Konqueror and missed.

Unfortunately it uses the new QtWebKit dom API (which will be in Qt 4.6) so it is only enabled if you are using the Qt master git branch or linking to QtWebKit Trunk.

Arora 0.7.1

2009-05-30T18:39:00.003+02:00

There were two build errors in Arora 0.7.0.

- On Windows 0.7.0 didn't compile
- The build would sometimes fail when using make -jX where X is greater then 1.

0.7.1. Fixes both of these issues and you can download it from arora-browser.org

Enjoy!

Arora 0.7.0!

2009-05-24T23:37:00.009+02:00

Source packages are available on arora-browser.org. Binary package will be put up shortly as they are built.

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com

Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net

Zsombor Gegesygzsombor@gmail.com

Guillaume Martres smarter@ubuntu.com

Benjamin K.Stuhl bks24@cornell.edu

Maia Kozheva sikon@ubuntu.com

Kristof Bal kristof.bal@gmail.com

Kenneth Rohde Christiansen kenneth.christiansen@openbossa.org

John Wimer john@god.vtic.net

Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com

Christopher Eby kreed@kreed.org

axasia axasia@gmail.com

There are a handful of features that have been added in 0.7.0. The biggest is the Open Search support that was blogged about last week.

Also added is the ability to turn on ClickToFlash. When this is enabled flash plugins are not automatically loaded, but a button is shown that the user has to click first. As the Adobe flash plugin isn't exactly known as a quality piece of software that can crash and leak memory having the ability to prevent it from loading and a easy way to load it when really wanted is nice.

One of the big changes in 0.6.0 was that when the Oxygen style was detected it would automatically switch to Plastique. The main reason we did the Oxygen style check was to stop all the bug reports about painting bugs in Oxygen, but we still received a lot of bug reports, only this time it is that we were not picking up the KDE style. So this change was reverted and we will just continue to point our users to the Oxygen developers when they report a bug in Oxygen.

To go with the 0.6.1 release Arora's which had to work around the disk cache bug in Qt 4.5.1 the settings dialog now lets you configure the disk cache.

The full changelog:

0.7.0
Interface
- Add support for OpenSearch to the toolbar search
- Add the ability to search from the webpage context menu
- Remember the boxes checked in the Clear Private Data dialog
- Support Back, Forward, Reload and Stop keys on multimedia keyboards
- Add the ability to click a button before loading flash (clickToFlash)
- Allow to enable/disable the cache
- Allow to specify the maximum cache size
- Add a setting specifying if the application should quit when last tab is closed.
- Revert the check for the Oxygen style so when under KDE4 Oxygen will be
used even if it has issues.
- Fix mid click to paste urls into Arora to have them be loaded
- Fix crash in Clear Privacy Dialog when cache is disabled
- In the download manager change the "Ok" Button to "Close"
- Fix the positioning of new tab and close tab buttons. Comparing to 0.6 they are just swapped now.
- Only set a git version if the string is not empty
- Update the tab bar visibility action when retranslating.
- Make refresh be both F5 and Ctrl+R
- Update year in copyright
- Fixed some spelling mistakes
- Ctrl+L does not function when the toolbar is hidden.
- Fix a typo in Info_mac.plist.
- Enable multiple selection in the history tree view.
- Respect the setting to hide confirmation of closing multiple tabs when quitting too
- Fix a problem with cookie rule deletion
- Improve handling of unreachable sites.
- Create a new tab only when left button is double-clicked.
- Improve XBel importing
- Don't fill the history with error pages.
- Improve the site icon when dragging. When the mouse is over it show the arrow cursor, Set the drag icon to the site icon, and set the drag text to the page title and not the url. (Example drag to the toolbar you want to get the title not the url)
- Only save the cookie exception rules if the dialog is accepted.
- Set cookies to 'session only' if new rule introduced that would only allow them for the session.
- Add ability to filter out tracking cookies, eg Google Analytics.
- Add 'Add Rule' button to the cookie dialog to create an exception on the current cookie.
- When a cookie is a session cookie show the string 'Session Cookie'
- Improve the cooking blocking implementation
- Add subdomain checking, eg when the policy says 'block def.com', then it will block cookies from 'def.com', 'www.def.com' but not from 'abcdef.com'
- Handle cookie rules with starting dot correctly

Behind the scenes
- Add a subclass of QWebPluginFactory that can be used for managing QWebPlugin's
- Add a static BrowserMainWindow::parentWindow(QWidget *) method that returns a main window being one of the passed widget's parents.
- Move QTRY functions into their own header file as it has no dependency on Arora and can be used by tests that don't require BrowserApplication
- Mark strings as not translatable where it doesn't make sense
- Move location bar site icon class into its own file
- Move the privacy indicator out into its own class and file
- Move the location bar classes into a location bar folder
- Add api to get the clear button and search button in the SearchWidget
- Remove the word 'slot' from the functions that are slots to be consistent with the reset of the source code.
- Don't translate dummy strings in the ui file
- Move HistoryManager into its own file and move the history classes into their own folder.
- Conserve memory by atomizing history strings
- Code style: Add m_ prefix before private variables
- Improvements & cleanup to the about dialog
- Improve the three editviews
- Add manualtest for the three edit views and an autotest for the editlistview.
- Change placesimport to correctly use SingleApplication
- Add WebPage::linkedResources(const QString&) method that returns a list of resources attached to the main document
- BrowserApplication::mainWindow() returns the currently active window

Build system
- Remove one second punishment because it didn't work and I didn't make autotests when I was punished
- Add foreach() style error to look for and fix existing occurences.
- When building by default don't have lrelase be verbose as it du/mps a lot of junk on the console
- Add commit hook to do basic style checking on the files being commited
- unset GIT_DIR to fix warnings that are printed to the console
- When building Arora also don't allow casts to ascii to detect bugs.
- Share compiled object files with the main arora binary to reduce build times

Enjoy!

OpenSearch support

2009-05-17T02:37:00.015+02:00

Arora has had a toolbar search since the beginnings. Its limitation is that you can only search on one particular search engine which is currently Google and you are not able to add new engines, while many browsers offer much more. And as changes in this area were repeatedly requested, we decided to take up this subject and yesterday fruits of our work were merged into the mainline, which will become 0.7 in a week. The most significant change is that now you can have as many search engines in the toolbar search as you want. You can switch between them using the toolbar search menu, which used to display recent searched phrases.

Following the topic of this blog - we decided to base our implementation on the support for OpenSearch format. It's a XML-based format describing search engines - see http://www.opensearch.org/ for more information. So what exactly does it mean for the end user?

First off, it allows you to easily add new engines to your collection. And as the format is very popular, you'll have no problem finding custom search engines. Many sites provide OpenSearch descriptions of their own search engines. They very often link descriptions with the sites - Arora will pick them up and list available engines in the toolbar search menu. When it founds any, you will be able to install those search engines just by one click.

There are also sites like http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ out there which collect dozens of OpenSearch described search engines in one place. Those allow you to add new engines to your collection just by clicking on specific links. Of course you are always asked if you really want to have the requested engine installed.

A simple manager has been created to allow some basic management like adding/removing engines. You can also restore default engines that are shipped with Arora and add new engines from local files.

While support for Google suggestions in the toolbar search popup has been introduced in 0.6, the OpenSearch implementation includes support for suggestion services linked in OpenSearch descriptions. Now you'll be provided suggestions whenever an engine supports them.

The context menu in the web view got integrated with OpenSearch engines. Now you can easily search for selected text using installed engines.

Please note that from the technical point of view, Arora does not support the entire OpenSearch standard. We've added support for most of the main specification aspects. As the specification is under strong development, we also have to support stuff that isn't in the specification any more but is still widely used out there.

We will be looking into new ways to integrate the OpenSearch capabilities even more and make searching easier and faster.

Also today we had a string freeze and we are going to release 0.7 in a week. In the meantime, any help with updating translations would be appreciated. If you are interested, checkout the translations wiki page.

0.6.1

2009-05-07T03:36:00.002+02:00

When using Arora with Qt 4.5.1 after a little while pages will stop rendering. This is because of a bug in 4.5.1 where renaming a file will cause the file descriptor to not be closed. QNetworkDiskCache is a simple cache and uses QTemporaryFile's for each new cached file and eventually the kernel wont let QNetworkDiskCache open a cache file because all of the previous files were not closed by Qt. When running against Qt 4.5.1 Arora will now disable the disk cache. This is the only change in 0.6.1. In the current version from Git, what will become 0.7.0 you can also now disable the disk cache and configure the size in the settings.

You can get the source tarball for 0.6.1 from http://arora-browser.org/.

Qt 4.5.1 & Cookies

2009-04-27T20:34:00.002+02:00

This past week Qt 4.5.1 was released by Nokia. In that release is a number of fixes for cookies issues for both Qt and QtWebKit including:

Pages that are in inside of an iframes that set cookies where having them set to the wrong path. This was seen on a number of sites that used the same method for providing a login box.

Sites that send multiple cookies were having only the first cookie being set and the rest were dropped.

And the most common cookie issue: Cookies with an expiration date that is not in a valid format were getting rejected. Unfortunately browsers such as Firefox support way more then the spec allows. I put together a new date parser that can parse cookies that Firefox can parse which is just about anything.

With these fixes a number of the reported cookie issues have been fixed for both Arora's users and anyone using QtWebKit in their application. It is highly recommended to upgrade to 4.5.1 when you can.

Arora 0.6!

2009-03-30T03:54:00.003+02:00

Source and binary packages are available on arora-browser.org

First off a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

Benjamin C Meyer

Jakub Wieczorek

Vincenzo Reale

Kristof Bal

Jason A. Donenfeld

Jakub Lužný

Tom Gundersen

Robert Hogan

Mark Reiche

Guillaume Martres

Elrond

Christian Franke

Benjamin K. Stuhl

Raphael Kubo da Costa

Paul Olav Tvete

Janusz Lewandowski

Darryl Kacher

Christopher Eby

If your name is shown, but you have a stock image and want to change that go to gravatar.com and set an image to go with your email address.

This past release has been very busy with over twice the number of changes that we have had in previous releases. First off a big bug that slipped into 0.5 was that keyboard shortcuts didn't always work. This was fixed shortly after 0.5 was released. Many of the changes are improvements and additions to the interface so starting with them here is some screenshot candy.

More control to the users! Added a possibility to control where target="_blank" links will be opened and default to a new tab.

Add the ability to set your preferred web content language

Coping what other browsers have done we added a "Bookmark All Tabs" action to the bookmark menu and the tabbar context menu and a "Open in Tabs" action to all bookmark menu's. For those who used the Konqueror profiles to save and load a group of bookmarks they will find this method to be nice and simple. Also there is now an action to add a folder to the bookmark menus.

As blogged about recently we added Google suggestions to the search widget

While we have always had popup blocking there is now a spot to turn pop-up blocking on and off if you need to.

When loading the webpage we now display some more information in the status bar.

If there is any active download when you quit Arora will now ask for confirmation before exiting.

While the htmlToXBel was in the Arora source it is now installed and the import dialog can use it to import html bookmarks.

One of the features in the WebKit included in Qt 4.5 is support full page zooming. You can zoom in or out and the both the text and images will be scaled.

While there has been a bunch of work improving the Oxygen style, the changes are all in KDE 4.3 so until 4.3 is release Arora will now fall back to Plastique if it detects the Oxygen style. This can be over ridden just by passing "-style oxygen" on the command line. And for any KDE style author out there: make sure you link to KIO so Arora will get the KDE file dialog. You don't have to do anything, but link to KIO and then Arora and other Qt applications will use the KDE file dialog rather then the Qt file dialog.

More changes that are visible in the interface:
- Add support for MidClick/Ctrl-Click/Shift-Ctrl-Click to all urls in Arora. Be it in menus, toolbars, links and javascript links.
- Add support for caching HTTP proxies when using Qt 4.5
- Revert to the default tab selection behavior after closing a tab to match other browsers
- Allow to close the browser with more than one window opened, which was previously impossible (it might be useful when you restore session on startup).
- Force selected window to be on top of the windows stack (previous solution was only activating the window on the taskbar, at least on some desktop environments).
- Middle button role should be inverted when "Select tabs and windows as they created" is selected
- Set bookmarks bar as default folder when executing Add Bookmark Dialog from bookmarks toolbar.
- Ctrl-0 is now zoom-reset, only support jumping to the first 9 tabs rather then 10
- The action to show the status bar isn't updated when entering/exiting fullscreen.
- slow down the loading animation to use less X11 resources
- Make 'Url' and 'Title' string translatable in Add Bookmark dialog.
- Making SSL warnings more verbose Especially show the Certs a bit
- Add common location bar shortcuts such as Alt-D
- Add support for XButton1 and XButton2 to be back/forward on the webview
- When opening a url from history include the old title which can populate the tab title.
- Clearing the cache should only be enabled by default when compiled with Qt 4.5
- Fixed typo that had clear cookies set checked twice instead of checking cookies once and cache once in the Reset dialog.
- One tab close button option should not affect tab open button appearance.
- Set Open action disabled in the download manager until the download is finished.
- Fix issue where actions in the menus were not being translated when you change the language.
- Added a new tool 'placesimport' to import Firefox 3+ history.
- Fix the download manager SqueezeLabel class so that doesn't use 100% cpu, also now under the BSD
- Tweak html error message to make more sense
- Several spelling errors in the interface and code.
- Save more of the main window state, window's fullscreen status, maximized status, menu bar visibility, normal size, and ensure that the menu bar and status bar are returned to their proper states if saving while the window is fullscreen.
- Open a downloaded file instead of the containing directory

Behind the scenes
-Upgrade the SearchLineEdit class
- Rather then using a QMenu use QCompleter now that LineEdit can let you set the text margin and the completer popup takes up the whole width.
- Re-code searchlineedit to just be a LineEdit subclass that has a search button and a clear button and nothing more.
- Re-code the SearchButton to use the QCompleter, take up less width when there isn't one and use a QImage.
- Update the toolbar search widget to use the completer rather then the old QMenu
- Significantly improve the startup time of Arora.
- Add new access functions to the DownloadItem data.
- Move the ClearButton and SearchButton class into its own file
- Fix searchbar for special chars such as '+'. This seems a bug in Qt's addQueryItem. Workaround is to use addEncodedQueryItem.
- delete the root bookmark node on exit to not generate errors in valgrind
- fix memory leaks in the autotest to confirm that Arora's xbel doesn't have any leaks
- Only clear the cookies if we have loaded them
- In ModelMenu rather then all submenu's being QMenu let them be specified by the implementation and as the default use ModelMenu.
- Add new menumodel manualtest
- Set the default max rows of the model menu to -1 and put the special case of 7 in the history menu code
- In 4.5 and beyond store the icon database in the cache directory
- Add a few more mimetypes and match the Firefox desktop file
- Only guess a url string is for a file if it is an absolute path.
- Improve the overall design and implimentation of url loading especially when dealing with a startin
- Several improvements to SingleApplication to make it more robust.
- Improve the git hooks and add a hook to spell check commits
- Don't hard code the location of tmp as it could easily not be /tmp as it is on OS X
- Remove executable bit from html not found file
- Be more vigilant about always using encoded urls when storing them in QString

Build system
- Ignore generated files on Windows
- Add a common way to install binaries and install the tools
- Add commit hook commit-msg with support for aspell to check the spelling of the commit message
- In a source tarball and there is no .git hard code the version and change number so a message doesn't goto the console complaining about no git
- Windows needs to link to advapi32 for GetUserName call, so add it to LIBS.
- Don't force the binary to be re-build every time make is called because of the locale.pri
- Install tools
- Improve the build times of the manualtests by sharing object files and simplifying the includes

Enjoy!

Google Suggest made even easier

2009-03-22T18:11:00.007+01:00

Over on Qt Labs Ariya made a blog entry "Google Suggest made easy" where he shows off a little application that has a line edit and will display in a drop down Google suggestions. With the comment that "I plan to add to the browser demo for Qt 4.6" and it being such a small feature I think Arora should have it today.

I created my own implementation for the utililty directory of arora. Everything in the utils directory of Arora is under the BSD license so it can be easily reused by other applications. GoogleSuggest is a QObject subclass with a slot suggest(QString), and a signal suggestions(QStringList suggestions, QString searchText). This makes it easy to plug into existing applications. To go with this class there is a manual test (all utility classes have manualtests and or autotests) there is a command line tool that outputs the suggestions of the arguments.

./googlesuggest family
family guy
family guy episodes
family tree
family feud
family dollar
family video
family watch dog
family.ca
family fun
family quotes

Using this class the toolbar search in Arora now shows off Google Suggest.

Also tonight we are freezing the strings in Arora for a week before releasing 0.6 so we can get updated translations. If you are interested in helping out with a translation checkout the translating wiki page.

0.5!

2009-02-20T19:02:00.000+01:00

After much too long Arora 0.5 has finally been tagged. This release contains a lot of fixes and polish to its existing features. The biggest visual addition is the Network tool which lets you monitor network traffic. Behind the scene the biggest change is the addition of a new cookie jar. When using 0.5 if you see any site that complains of cookies please report it and it will be investigated. You can download the Arora 0.5 source from the project site. Binaries for your favorite distro should be appearing soon (and if it is missing feel free to contribute one!).

0.5 Changelog

Interface
- Add new Network Access Monitor tool that shows each network request as it passes.
- Added option for showing only one close Button
- Don't add empty tabs if closed to recently closed tabs menu.
- Support HTTP proxies which listen in ports higher than 10000
- Save more space in full screen mode - hide menu and status bars.
- Added an option in source viewer menu for wrapping code lines.
- Open pages from autocompletion list directly instead of filling the bar with their addresses.

- Don't show Open actions if the item is a Folder in the Bookmark Manager
- Allow filtering bookmarks and histories by URLs as well.
- Add drag functionality to Bookmark and History menu's
- Allow selecting multiple bookmarks when ctrl is pressed.
- Added support for renaming bookmarks through their context menus.
- Expanded bookmark menu - added Change URL and made Rename displayed also on folders.
- Allow for unlimited bookmarks in a folder on bookmark bar

- Added privacy indicator to the location bar
- Uncheck the privacy action when user aborts initial private browsing dialog.
- When enabling or disabling private browsing only the checkbox on the current window is updated

- Display missing Copy action in context menu if a link is selected.
- Make tab reload action in the context menu work
- Fix Middleclick on open tab to not have inconsistent behavior.
- On some web pages, middle-clicking a link opened it in the same window.
- Refined drag & drop handling in bookmarks toolbar. Fixed a bug, when page was assigned to inappropriate folder due to more than one folder having same name.
- Implement simple context menu in bookmarks toolbar. Let user change bookmark URL in Add Bookmark dialog.

Behind the scenes
- Brand new more compliant, faster cookie jar
- Brand new Language Manager which selects the correct language on start and lets you choose a different language via the Help menu.
- Separate the cookie classes into separate files.
- Fix a memory leak when creating the context menu under Qt 4.5+
- LineEdit utility class is now under the BSD license
- The error web pages are now translatable.
- Encode urls rather then use toString in various places to prevent loss of url data.
- When using foreach try to use a const reference so a copy isn't made (slower) compared to the reference (faster).
- Add a new tool to convert bookmarks that are in the html format into the XBel format (not used in Arora yet).
- Various code style and general keeping the code clean fixes
- Add Implementation to get the current username on Windows for the single application

Build system
- Add script to build OS X package using the new macdeployqt tool in Qt 4.5
- Building with QT_STRICT_ITERATORS to catch errors.
- Enhance support for building with multiple WebKit trunk branches
- Adds the ability to generate code documentation with doxygen

A big thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release.

Arora Authors:
Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net
Diego Iastrubni elcuco@kde.org
Jason A. Donenfeld Jason@zx2c4.com
Jakub Wieczorek faw217@gmail.com
Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com
Christian Franke cfchris6@ts2server.com
Matvey Kozhev sikon@ubuntu.com
Adam Treat treat@kde.org
Tor Arne Vestbø tavestbo@trolltech.com
Ariya Hidayat ariya.hidayat@trolltech.com
Josef Kufner jk@myserver.cz
Benjamin K. Stuhl bks24@cornell.edu
porphyr porphyr@gmx.de
Janusz Lewandowski lew21st@gmail.com
Daniel Albuschat d.albuschat@gmail.com
Vincenzo Reale smart2128@baslug.org
John Schember john@nachtimwald.com
Chris Lee clee@mg8.org
Alexandre Bique bique.alexandre@gmail.com
ABuus amb@lafnet.dk
Zack Rusin zack@kde.org
Tom Gundersen teg@jklm.no
Simon Hausmann simon@lst.de
Richard Moore rich@beast.needcoffee.co.uk
Raphael Kubo da Costa kubito@gmail.com
Pavol Rusnak stick@gk2.sk
Paul Olav Tvete paul@trolltech.com
Marius Bugge Monsen mariusbu@pvv.org
Gergely Nagy gergely.nagy@interware.co.hu
Chris Hills chaz@chaz6.com
Carlos Júnior carlos@milk-it.net

Join the party on freenode in #arora as we begin work on 0.6.

New Network Monitor Tool

2009-01-30T07:13:00.004+01:00

Merged in a little networking tool to Arora this evening. The Network Monitor logs all the QNetworkRequests and QNetworkReply's that are sent while the window is open. You can inspect all of the headers that are sent and received and search the requests. This is really a developer tool that will help make it easier to debug network related issues with Arora. Before anyone asks because this is a debugging tool once the plugin system is more fully finished it will most likely be moved out and made into a plugin. Thanks goes out to Richard Moore who started the work on this tool.

Related to this recently an experimental cookie jar has been put into Arora. If you have any login issues on websites when using the Arora found on GitHub (not the 0.4 release) with this new cookie jar please file a bug so that it can be investigated.

A Modern Webkit browser on Windows 98

2009-01-10T03:13:00.003+01:00

Thanks to cfchris6 who compiled a binary of Arora that runs on Windows98. Looking around there are not too many options for modern browsers on Win9x. Even I.E., FireFox, and Chrome all do not support it, but there are still Win9x boxes out there, guess the question is if they would want a modern browser or if they are happy with what they have.

New Binaries with Qt 4.5 snapshots

2008-10-07T20:26:00.005+02:00

We have two new binaries bundles for people to play around with.

Windows: Arora Snapshot (10-7-2008) Installer.exe
OS X: Arora-intel-qt4.5.dmg

Both binaries use the Qt 4.5 snapshot so you will get the faster javascript and plugin support. The previous Windows binary which was a little old now and had been up there for two month had been downloaded over 20K times. It is fantastic the number of people who have downloaded and checked out Arora. The new OS X package was made using the new macdeployqt which is include in Qt 4.5 and makes creating an application bundle with Qt much easier.

QtWebKit trunk is now in Qt snapshots

2008-10-02T00:33:00.005+02:00

Up until now if you wanted to enjoy YouTube you had to link Arora to a hand compiled version of QtWebKit, aka QtWebKit trunk. This was an extra annoying step that many people have done. But no more! QtWebKit trunk has been merged into Qt main (what will be Qt 4.5) so to enjoy all of the latest QtWebKit features such as flash and the new javascript engine all you have to do is compile Arora against a Qt snapshot. When upgrading to qt-snapshot you will also get disk cache, a new tabbar and other improvements. For your convenience here are links to the correct spot to report issues you find:

Bugs for Arora Dialogs, bookmarks, download manager, i.e. everything , but rendering.
Bug for QtWebKit Webpage rendering issues
Bugs for Qt Qt specific bugs or Qt compile issues.

0.4!

2008-10-01T03:36:00.004+02:00

Reaching the end of the month and so Arora 0.4 has been tagged. No major features this time, just consistent improvements and polish (there was some downtime as I moved back to the states this past month). You can download the Arora 0.4 source or head over to the Arora project page where binaries for your favorite distro are be uploaded (and if it is missing feel free to contribute one!).

0.4
Interface
- New source viewer with search and syntax highlighting.
- Make middle click on bookmarks menus open the user in a new tab.
- Added the ability to change the language from the Help menu.
- Double left click location bar selects all of the text.
- Incorporate Jens Explorer style into Arora on Window for a better look and feel on XP and Vista. http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/06/08/explorer-style-toolbars/
- Change the "icon" on the next/prev search for RTL desktops: next points to the right, and previous points to the right
- Various RightToLeft fixes for for Mozilla's bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219070
- When the url scheme is https make the location bar background turn yellow.
- When the history is cleared also clear the recently closed tabs list
- Always populate the location bar with the completer
- Only shrink the toolbar icons on OS X.
- Only offset the search widget text when using Qt 4.5
- When clicking on a bookmark in a folder in the toolbar emit the proper signals to the url is opened.
- When dropping text on the webpage load the url
- When the location bar has focus don't change the text.

A big thanks to everyone new who contributed to this release.

AUTHORS
Benjamin C Meyer ben@meyerhome.net
Diego Iastrubni elcuco@kde.org
Jason A. Donenfeld Jason@zx2c4.com
Jakub Lužný limoto94@gmail.com
Christian Franke cfchris6@ts2server.com
Matvey Kozhev sikon@ubuntu.com
Ariya Hidayat ariya.hidayat@trolltech.com
Josef Kufner jk@myserver.cz
Adam Treat treat@kde.org
Daniel Albuschat d.albuschat@gmail.com
cfchris6 cfchris6@buster.xtense.dyndns.org
Vincenzo Reale smart2128@baslug.org
Tor Arne Vestbø tavestbo@trolltech.com
John Schember john@nachtimwald.com
Chris Lee clee@mg8.org
ABuus amb@lafnet.dk
Zack Rusin zack@kde.org
Simon Hausmann simon@lst.de
Marius Bugge Monsen mariusbu@pvv.org
Gergely Nagy gergely.nagy@interware.co.hu
Chris Hills chaz@chaz6.com
Carlos Júnior carlos@milk-it.net

Things are looking up for the future releases. Beyond what is planned for Arora, WebKit trunk has been merged into the Qt snapshots which will bring lots of goodies from SquirlFish Extreame to OGG video.

100 on Acid3

2008-08-26T17:16:00.002+02:00

Zecke has posted a blog entry showing off some patches to QtWebKit that brings QtWebKit Acid3 test to 100/100. Head over and give him thank for taking the time to track down the edge cases.

Windows and Vista style upgrade

2008-08-13T19:20:00.005+02:00

A little over a year ago one of Trolltech's developers, Jens (the same guy who made our awesome logo) posted a blog entry on labs.trolltech.com with some style code that takes the normal Qt XP style and adds Microsoft Explorer style tool bars on XP and Vista. I have integrated the code into Arora for a new upgrade in our look.

Screenshots

2008-08-06T18:59:00.002+02:00

After the announcement of Mozilla's Aurora project the Arora homepage has gotten a number of new visiters, many of them probably looking for screenshots. I have hastily put together a wiki page of screenshots that can show off some of the features in Arora.

http://code.google.com/p/arora/wiki/Screenshots

0.3!

2008-08-04T22:26:00.005+02:00

I am happy to announce Arora 0.3. Many new features and improvements are in this release. Keeping the goals of the project the biggest feature was the addition of boring disk cache when using the Qt 4.5 snapshot. Cache is a fundimental feaure of a browser and to a simple browser without one isn't much of a browser. It is not just a feature for Arora, but something that is desired by anyone using QtWebkit or QNetworkAccessManager and I have worked hard the past two weeks getting the feature completed. More details can be found on trolltech labs. After the disk cache, the class the makes up the Location bar has been re-written. The new class is fundamentally much cleaner and designed to have the ability to add more widgets in the location bar. A feature that will hopefully be used by extensions in the future.

The complete list of changes:

0.3
- With Qt 4.5 use disk cache
- Created a new LineEdit that handles adding side widgets in a clean, simple and elegant way.
- With Qt 4.5 use movable tabs
- Add a way to set the minimum font size in the settings.
- When you ctrl-click on a bookmark item in the bookmark toolbar open it in a new tab
- Fix possible crash on startup; Initialize htmls resource
- When making the text larger or smaller, use predefined zoom levels.
- Mouse button 4 and 5 connected to action back and forward. like firefox and ie
- Clear history: Added confirm dialog
- Shortcuts in the Edit menu like in Firefox.
- Save the state of inspector across sessions.
- When only a hostname and port are entered in the url prepend http://
- Base the width of the tab on a font rather then a hard coded value
- Tweak the main window look better on OS X and less out of place
- Add support for javascript bookmarklets
- Add option to automatically restore the session on startup.
- Fix segfault caused by the clear private data dialog.
- Save the location of the toolbars
- Improve a number of the strings (feedback from MentalMaelstrom)
- Tweak action accelerators (the same ones were being used)

Build system
- Allow building Arora with both Debug/Release of WebKit trunk
- Only include the sha1 and change number in the version when using git.
- Create utils directory to contain non-Arora specific classes
- Run desktop file through desktop-file-validate and correct the errors

Autotests
- Add QTRY_COMPARE and QTRY_VERIFY for the autotests to use.
- add AUTOTESTS define when running autotests to prevent accessing running arora's and sending url's to it
- Fix autotest failures (test related, not arora)
- Detect which version of qmake to use when building the autotests
- Give a 1 second punishment if there is no autotest for the source file that was changed
- Emit a warning of a file doesn't have a matching autotest
- Update modeltest code to match Trolltech's svn

And the full list of the authors, now even longer!

Jason A. Donenfeld
Jakub Lužný
Matvey Kozhev
Ariya Hidayat
Josef Kufner
Daniel Albuschat
Adam Treat
Tor Arne Vestbø
John Schember
Chris Lee
smart2128
Vincenzo Reale
Simon Hausmann
Marius Bugge Monsen
Gergely Nagy
Chris Hills
ABuus

P.S. For those of you using WebKit trunk on Windows I have been informed that flash support is in/done and to please report any issues you notice.

A new Location Bar

2008-07-08T19:56:00.004+02:00

This past weekend I have been hacking on a replacement for one of the classes in Arora. ExLineEdit was the the base class for the location bar and the search widgets and was a big hack that only allowed for one widget on either side of the text. The new class is cleaner in every way and allows for any number of widgets on either side.

The location bar, search widget, and toolbar search were based on ExLineEdit. Unfortunately when first creating this classes I couldn't find a good solution to add side widgets and ended up with a solution that worked, but it was a hack where I put a QLineEdit inside of a widget and did a lot of painting and event handling myself. When originally developing the demo browser I tried to not have any hacks. If Qt didn't support a feature I didn't either. This made life a lot easier and the code cleaner. The one place I didn't follow that was with the Location Bar because a web browser absolutely must have the website icon in the location bar. Unable to find a good solution I ended up writing a class that was inflexible, had a horrible API, plays badly with new styles and I have been unhappy with it ever sense.

Now that things have settled down I took another look at the problem and was able to find an elegant solution for Qt 4.4 and made a patch for QLineEdit for an even cleaner solution in 4.5. Beyond the technical solution to the bug I made a new subclass of QLineEdit called LineEdit that added a few functions to put widgets inside of the line edit on the left or right hand side. This new class is the base class for the new LocationBar class and search widgets. The side widgets are automatically handled by a layout so they can be shown and hidden whenever you want.

Before merging this class into Arora I wrote autotests and a manualtest. Below is the manual test for the line edit class where you can see multiple widgets on either side of the line edit.

From the users perspective the only thing that should be different is that the completer will now line up under the location bar rather then slightly offset as it has been, but under the covers the code is much cleaner and more maintainable.

Having the ability to add widgets and show/hide them on the fly in a clean way will be very useful for Arora in the future. There are many extensions that people have talked about writing such as the FireFox3 bookmark star, a Go! button, rss feeds, and more. With the ability to add widget easily all of these features will be easy to make. With a good set of core classes Arora should do well.

The new LineEdit, LocationBar, updated search widgets, manualtests and autotests have been merged into Arora this evening. Enjoy!

Arora on the web

2008-07-07T20:14:00.003+02:00

Lately I have noticed Arora being mentioned at various places around the net. Collecting them together here are various things, from blog entries, reviews, commentary or just shoutout's about Arora.

An excellent overview of Arora
Another review of Arora
A suggestion to make Arora the default browser on suse.
Arora is now on Wikipedia.
On Digg
Linquidat's article on reddit
Mentioned on various forums such as this one
Blog entry from when Arora first was announced.
Showing off Arora in QGtkstyle
A dev is looking for a new browser and gets lots of suggestions to check out Arora
Arora in Debian Sid
Arora in Arch Linux
Enabling the webInspector in Arora

Feel free to post more links you know about or find.

Update:
Arora in a wordpress plugin screenshot

A better tab bar

2008-07-02T18:56:00.000+02:00

The past six weeks or so I have hacking on the QTabWidget and QTabBar classes in Qt. One of the first feature requests in Arora was the ability to have the close buttons on the tabs. Qt didn't allow this without a bunch of work and hacks. Knowing that a lot of other people wanted this same feature in Qt I took some time to implement it and other features (the two classes were not being very actively feature maintained). These went into Qt main (what will be 4.5).

From the user perspective when running against the Qt main snapshot you will see the following

Close buttons are now placed on each tabs

The buttons to the left and right of the tabs (new and close) are gone

The 2px useless frame on the left/bottom/right side of the webpage is now gone. When maximized and your mouse is on the far right it actually scrolls as you would expect.

Rather then clicking and dragging (a dnd box) and dropping it where you want a tab to go and then having all the tabs suddenly re-arrange you can now actually drag a tab to where you want it to go and it actually moves with your mouse and the other tabs automatically slide out of your way.

In OS X the tabs use the same styling as Safari, Terminal and other tab based applications.

For the more technical details and a video of the animation check out my labs.trolltech.com Some QTabBar & QTabWidget Love blog entry.

Beyond just that tab bar I have put in some time to make Arora feel more at home in OS X. The combination of that work finally makes Arora look not half bad in OS X.

Arora 0.2

2008-06-24T22:12:00.000+02:00

This evening I tagged Arora 0.2.

Most of the changes have to do with bug fixes and improvements all through Arora. Further fixes have gone into Qt's Networking code and QtWebKit and will be part of Qt 4.4.1 (and later Qt 4.5).

Here are just a few of the changes that are part of 0.2:
- Improved tabs
- Add make install on unix
- Translations
- New reset dialog
- New about dialog
- Add search banner
- Rename to Arora and a new application icon
- Project specific git hooks
- Branch from the Qt demo browser with new autotests and manualtests.

Although most of these "bigger" features are not exactly exciting this release has really been about polishing Arora which is where all the smaller patches went. More and more Arora is able to be a primary browser and is very stable for day to day use.

We have gotten a number of new devs who have contributed patches to Arora. A big thanks to all the devs for their patches:

Jason A. Donenfeld
Jakub Lužný
Matvey Kozhev
Daniel Albuschat
Ariya Hidayat
Adam Treat
Tor Arne Vestbø
John Schember
Chris Lee
Marius Bugge Monsen
Chris Hills

Continue reporting your bugs and feature requests to http://code.google.com/p/arora/issues/list

Onto 0.3!

QtWebKit projects

2008-06-02T08:43:00.000+02:00

Ran across another QtWebKit project this weekeend: wkhtml A simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and Qt. There will no doubt be many usefull applications that use QtWebKit, do you know of any others that have been released already?

Windows Binary

2008-05-22T02:22:00.000+02:00

Jason Donenfeld has built a nice windows installer of the current version of Arora with Qt 4.4.0 so all the Windows users to give Arora a whirl without having to compile anything.

Lots of little improvements have been going in and we got a new dialog to reset Arora today. If you noticed a memory leak before, upgrading should fix that for you.

arora-browser.org

2008-05-21T23:14:00.000+02:00

This evening I picked up the domain http://www.arora-browser.org/. It just points to arora.googlecode.com for now, but at least I own it so we can use it in the future if we want v.s. some spammer who will come along eventually.

YouTube and more developers

2008-05-20T13:23:00.000+02:00

Although not new news I figured you all would enjoy seeing youtube working in Arora with webkit trunk and what you can look forward to in Qt 4.5. (disclaimer: webkit trunk is a bit broken sometimes and really for development, not users) This screenshot was taken in KDE4, notice the Oxygen style bugs, most notably with the scrollbars, hopefully those guys will fix that soon.

After returning from my vacation and with the release of Qt 4.4 there has been a lot of interest in helping out with Arora. A number of people have joined the irc room and contributed patches too. There are two new wiki pages, the first one is a getting started page to help people build Arora that are curious and the second is a contributing page with one way you can contribute patches to Arora. Others have begun reporting bugs and feature requests. Very exciting!

New Application Icon

2008-05-04T16:11:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Jens Bache Arora has a new icon. It has been pushed into the repository and put up on the website. Now we need a name for our sleeping mascot.

Hello World

2008-04-19T12:47:00.000+02:00

After forking from the demo browser in Qt I wanted to add at least one new feature before announcing Arora and that feature turned out to be the search banner. When the search box is shown an animation drops it down from the top of the webpage. The cool part is that as it does this the webpage is scrolled the same amount that the widget is moved down causing the page to not view from the viewers perspective.