Just months after the long awaited release of NetSurf version 1.0, the team has provided us with an update.After years of hard work, you may have assumed the NetSurf developers, arguably the creators of the most up to date usable RISC OS browser, would have taken a break after getting to the important 1.0 milestone in time for Wakefield 2007. Not these guys though, and following feedback from punters, an updated version, 1.1, was released this week to address some of the bugs and security issues found in the May release.
The new release is provided for both RISC OS and other platforms by using the GTK library. Some notable bugs are fixed and general updates for RISC OS have been found in the charset detector, cookie system, error page builder, scroll wheel system - now supported in the hotlist and history list - ArtWorks renderer, and hot list entries are now more up to date. This latest version also includes updated documentation and translations.
The full list of tweaks and enhancements is here.
Interestingly, with the release of the GPL version 3, the latest version of NetSurf's open source license has been changed to GPLv2-only with a clause allowing for the use of OpenSSL. The development team leaders made a considerable effort to contact all known past code contributors to agree on the licensing path taken.
Even though these updated version releases are often found a couple of months apart, the latest test build is available as a direct snapshot of the web browser, updated every 15 minutes, direct from the team. With talk of future features being, amongst other things, eventual Javascript support, updates to come from the team should certainly prove to be useful.
Links
NetSurf website
Wikipedia entry