Camino

For anyone who has been checking the blog, I know it probably seemed that nothing was getting done. My last update was several weeks ago. But, believe it or not, some of my work has actually landed—which means it’s included in the latest builds of Camino. You can download the nightly builds of what will eventually be released as Camino 2.1 right here. So exactly what did I do? Well, two things. First, I updated the appearance of the autocomplete popup window to make it easier to read (more whitespace!) and also just to make it prettier. This change is also known as Bug 495496. The second thing I did was make it possible to autocomplete from bookmarks (in Camino < 2.1, autocomplete suggestions only come from history). This was Bug 166288. As you can tell by its relatively low number, this bug was filed a long time ago. Here’s some before and after shots for good measure:

What’s next? Well, in response to these new changes, many complaints have been filed. Things don’t work exactly as they did before and some things should just work better. Here’s a couple things I broke:

• Apparently, the autocomplete popup window doesn’t always go away on its own. It’s rare and you can always hit esc to force it to go away (Bug 505263).
• Some pseudo-protocols don’t show up during autocomplete anymore. What is a pseudo-protocol? If you don’t know, you probably don’t care, but basically it’s a part of a URL that tells the browser to do something special. If any of the URLs in your history begin with about: or file: or javascript: or data: or a few others, they won’t show up in autocomplete. A fix for this is coming (Bug 504688), but it’s not my top priority right now.

There are many other requests for improvements to the location bar and/or autocomplete window, and I will try to get to them all. Right now, however, I’m focusing on two things: speeding up the autocomplete search and doing something about redirected URLs, which currently show up with blank titles and generic favicons.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.