MacSurf 0.6.2 — Speed run

Released: 2026-05-25
Codename: Speed-Run
Engine HEAD: fixes263
Verified on: Power Macintosh G3 iMac, Mac OS 9.1

The headline

Cold-load mactrove.com went from 30+ seconds to ~2-3 seconds. v0.6.2 is a focused performance + correctness sprint on top of v0.6.1. ~33 fix rounds (fixes231 through fixes263) covering HTTPS keep-alive, persistent dead-host blocklist, on-disk cache HIT serving, partial-body salvage, friendly fetch-error page, HTTPS-default URL submit with HTTP fallback, deferred PNG decode at display resolution, TLS session resumption, TCP_NODELAY, and ~80% reduction in log overhead.

The browser feels different. Type, click, and the page is there.

Headline numbers — cold mactrove.com load

| | v0.6.1 | v0.6.2 |
| ---------------------------------- | -------- | ---------- |
| Click → finish_conversion | ~30 s | ~2 s |
| Fonts.googleapis timeout (cold) | 15 s × 2 | 4 s × 1, then 17 ms FAST-FAIL forever |
| Warm reload (cache HIT) | n/a | <200 ms |
| Per-PNG decode at native | 56 forced | deferred to display-size on first paint |
| FlushVol-per-cache-write | ~500 ms wasted | gone |
| Log-write overhead per cold load | ~1 s of FSWrite | ~10 ms (4 KB buffered) |
| Cold handshakes (mactrove session) | 34 | 4 |

Net effect: 35–50 seconds of wall-clock savings per cold mactrove load, plus warm reloads that feel instantaneous.

What landed (by area)

HTTPS transport

• fixes231 / 232a — Keep-alive pool. 16-entry OSTLSConnection cache keyed by host:port. HS_QUEUED first tries the pool; on hit, skip handshake entirely and jump straight to HS_SEND_REQ. ~700 ms ECDHE keygen + cert chain validation saved per reuse. Paired with a started flag (fixes232a) so NetSurf's max_fetchers_per_host throttle gates dispatch, not just setup — pool actually catches reuses on parallel sub-resource loads.
• fixes234 — Bigger read + pump. READ_CHUNK 1 KB → 8 KB, PUMP_STEPS 8 → 32. Body delivery ceiling lifts from ~60 KB/s to ~480 KB/s; BearSSL decrypts a full TLS record per pump instead of being yielded mid-decrypt.
• fixes235 — 4 s no-progress timeout. Was 15 s; the only thing that was waiting that long was fingerprint-rejected hosts.
• fixes236 / 244 — Dead-host blocklist + success guard. Hosts that time out get a session-scope blocklist (https: dead-host ADD ... FAST-FAIL). The success-guard refuses to blocklist any host that ever fetched successfully — transient timeouts on healthy origins (mactrove on a slow moment) never poison.
• fixes246 — Pool entry TTL. Entries older than 20 s get disposed at take-time, dodging server idle-close + stale-write failures.
• fixes252 — TCP_NODELAY. Disables Nagle's algorithm post-OTConnect. Saves ~200 ms per cold connection from Nagle/delayed-ACK interaction.
• fixes254 — TLS session resumption. 16-entry session-parameters cache keyed by host:port. After every successful handshake, br_ssl_engine_get_session_parameters saves the session ID + master secret + cipher; before the next handshake to the same host, br_ssl_engine_set_session_parameters injects it so the ClientHello carries the session ID. Server-supported abbreviated handshake saves ~700-1200 ms per pool-expired reconnect.
• fixes255 — Salvage threshold + don't-pool-stalled. Partial-body salvage now requires ≥ 512 bytes (tiny 200-byte JA3-reject responses aren't useful content); salvaged connections are flagged keep_alive_ok = 0 so the dead-host blocklist still catches them and the stalled connection doesn't get pooled.
• fixes256 — Persistent dead-host blocklist. deadhosts.txt in the cache folder; saved after every dead_host_add, preloaded at startup. Cold-launch first attempt to fonts.googleapis.com now fast-fails in ~17 ms instead of paying the 4 s timeout.
• fixes262 / 263 — Auto-upgrade FALLBACK actually works. Two bugs from the v0.6.1 → v0.6.2 work fixed: stack-buffer dangling pointer for the redirect URL (262), and llcache's unsupported redirect %d rejection because the FETCH_REDIRECT carried http_code = 0 instead of 301 (263). Now classic.mactrove.com and macintoshgarden.org (HTTP-only retro sites) auto-fall-back to HTTP and load.
• fixes241 — Slot pool 64. Setup is called for every queued fetch up-front; image-heavy pages were hitting the 32-slot ceiling and silently failing sub-resources.

Cache + storage

• fixes237 — HTTPS cache HIT path re-enabled. Disabled in v0.6 because the synthetic FETCH_HEADER dispatch included an "HTTP/1.1 200" status line that confused html_create. Now matches the HTTP fetcher's working pattern (Content-Type header only + fetch_set_http_code). Warm reloads of mactrove serve from disk in ~17 ms.
• fixes248 — FlushVol off in cache_store. Was firing per file × ~20 stores per cold load = ~500 ms of disk-sync wait. HFS's normal write-back is sufficient; explicit flush happens at app quit.

Layout + render

• fixes240 — Reformat coalescing. browser_window_schedule_reformat now uses a 50 ms delay (was 0). Resource-arrival bursts during page load (each sub-resource triggers a reformat) dedup into single reformats at burst tail. ~5 s saved per cold load (was ~44 redundant reformats × 250 ms).
• fixes257 — Image fade fix. Box-filter pre-downscale (fixes203) was disabled in v0.6 during a dark-grey investigation that turned out to have a different root cause; re-enabled and threshold lowered from 3× to 1.5×. mactrove's 1058×245 logo at 400×92 (2.6× downscale) now pre-downscales sharply instead of going through CopyMask's 1-bit-mask-loses-pixels fade path.
• fixes239 — Hover debounce. macos9_poll_mouse_hover throttled to 10 Hz; node-boundary recascade calls drop from ~60 per second of mouse movement to ~10.

Image decode

• fixes259 — Deferred PNG decode at display resolution. Mirrors the QT-image path. Convert phase does lodepng_inspect only (IHDR read); the actual decode + box-filter to display size happens on first redraw when layout's dst dims are known. Memory: native PNG buffers never held long-term. Perceived speed: page renders without waiting for N PNG decodes during convert.
• fixes258 — lodepng CRC + Adler32 skip. ~5-15% PNG decode speedup for free (per-byte checksums add up on G3).
• fixes260 — Per-image cap 8 MB → 16 MB. Mactrove's hero images at near-native display were getting skipped under 8 MB; 16 MB now covers ~2000×2000 displays with headroom.

UX

• fixes242 — Friendly fetch-error page. Replaces the bare white "MacSurf" page that NetSurf's about:query/fetcherror was rendering. Shows the actual failed URL in a styled <tt> box, three plausible reasons, and a retry link.
• fixes243 — Partial-body salvage. Servers that send some HTTP response then stall (Google's JA3-blocked path is the classic case) get treated as HTTP/1.0-style "response ends on close" if we have ≥ 512 bytes — NetSurf renders the truncated HTML gracefully instead of routing to about:fetcherror.
• fixes249 / 249c — HTTPS-default URL submit + HTTP fallback. Typed bare hostnames (google.com, mactrove.com) now upgrade to https://. If the HTTPS fetch fails for any reason (handshake, timeout, peer-close), the fetcher emits FETCH_REDIRECT to http://, so retro HTTP-only sites still work.

Diagnostics + log

• fixes233 — Log timestamps. Every line is now prefixed with [N] (ticks since first log) so the in-session wall-clock is visible.
• fixes250 / 251 / 253 — Log spam silenced. LAYOUTPHASE / MCOL / FLEXPHASE (~7300 lines/cold-load), plot_rect[N] / plot_text[N] / svg_* / slot[N] / GRADIENT (~3000 more), update: chrome lines + gw_event: e=N + LAYOUT_CRUMB + SITE url= (~600 more). ~10000 lines saved per cold load; per-category re-enable with MACSURF_VERBOSE_LAYOUT_LOG / _PAINT_LOG / _REDRAW_LOG.
• fixes261 — Buffered log writes. 4 KB chunk: ~3 FSWrite calls per MS_LOG → ~10 FSWrites per cold load total. Flushes on overflow, on explicit macsurf_debug_log_flush, or on session close.
• fixes247 — Font probes off by default. ~84 ms / launch saved (diagnostic-only).
• fixes245 — Silenced unaccept #N counter. Title-bar noise from NetSurf core's content-handler reject path; zero diagnostic value to users.

HTTP fetcher

• fixes239 — HTTP no-progress aligned to 240 ticks (4 s). HTTPS-default routes nearly everything through the HTTPS fetcher now; HTTP fetcher's parity in case of legacy http:// traffic.

Known limitations carried forward from v0.6

• Google / Facebook / Tier-1 fingerprinted endpoints still reject our TLS ClientHello (BearSSL's JA3 fingerprint, not browser-shape) — fingerprint-blocked hosts fast-fail via the persistent dead-host list now.
• Direct-navigation to image URLs still renders blank (image content_handler dispatch at top level).
• CSS background-image: var(--header-tile) where --header-tile is set inline on a single element doesn't resolve — our libcss custom-property aggregation is document-scoped global, not per-element. Mactrove's random header background falls back to no-image.
• Stacked background-image: linear-gradient(...), linear-gradient(...) (mactrove's grid tile) not natively rendered — NetSurf only renders background-image: url(...); our -macsurf-gradient: rewrite only patches the background-color slot.
• All v0.5 known limitations carry forward unchanged.

Hardware verification

• Power Macintosh G3 iMac, Mac OS 9.1, CarbonLib 1.5+ — primary development hardware, full multi-page smoke test (mactrove, classic.mactrove, macintoshgarden.org) all rendered correctly.
• SheepShaver + OS 9.0.4 — full Carbon init + UI smoke; networking is the limitation (SheepShaver's OT TCP doesn't reach the live internet without manual ethernet config, so HTTPS fetches hit NO_PROGRESS_TICKS and route to about:fetcherror). Good for build-smoke gating; not a substitute for hardware-side fetcher testing.

Download

• MacSurf.sit — ready-to-run StuffIt archive. Expand on Mac OS 9.1+ with CarbonLib 1.5+ and launch.
• Source: this repository at tag v0.6.2.