MacSurf 1.4 — Open House

Released: 2026-06-01
Codename: Open House
Engine HEAD: fixes352 (MacSurf side); macTLS unchanged from v1.3.1
Verified on: Power Macintosh G3 iMac, Mac OS 9.2.2

The headline

MacSurf 1.4 closes the JavaScript marathon. Twenty-three GitHub issues went from open to closed in this release — setTimeout / setInterval / requestAnimationFrame, window.location, window.history, URL + URLSearchParams, element.classList, element.style, Event + CustomEvent + MouseEvent + KeyboardEvent constructors, MutationObserver, DOMParser, FormData, localStorage, fetch, addEventListener for load + DOMContentLoaded, plus <details> / <summary> toggle and the hidden attribute. A purpose-built probe page (mactrove.com/t.html) ran 19 JS probes on a G3 iMac and finished JS 19/19 pass, 0 fail.

Three diagnostic / power-user features land too: about:cache, about:memory, about:config, and about:perf now render real diagnostic pages with live counters. View Source is wired through content_get_source_data + a data:text/html URL so it renders the markup inline. Find-in-page opens a real Carbon dialog with a text input and Find / Cancel buttons, then highlights matches via NetSurf's textsearch.

Underneath that, the data: URL fetcher was a stub returning empty body since launch — fixed in this release. Every data: URL on every page now works, not just View Source.

about:config showing the live nsoption table. Same Geneva chrome and orange-banded table styling as about:cache / about:memory / about:perf. Type any of the four into the URL bar; the new RFC 3986 scheme scanner in fixes351 stops the old strstr("://") heuristic from mangling them to https://about:cache.

What's new

JavaScript marathon

The JS bridge gained twenty-three closed issues in this release. The full list, with the fix-round that closed each one, is below. Each is exercised by the probe suite at mactrove.com/t.html (J0–J17 + J-write + J18 / J19 visual cards).

| Probe | Issue | Closed by |
|---|---|---|
| J1 | setTimeout / setInterval / clearTimeout / clearInterval | #103 fixes321 |
| J2 | requestAnimationFrame | #117 fixes322-324 |
| J3 | window.location (full surface: href + protocol + host + hostname + port + pathname + search + hash + origin + assign + replace) | #118 fixes323 + fixes350 |
| J4 | window.history (back + forward + go + length + pushState + replaceState + state) | #122 fixes324 + fixes350 |
| J5 | URL + URLSearchParams | #123 fixes325 |
| J6 | element.classList.add / remove / toggle / contains | #30 fixes326 + fixes349 |
| J7 | element.style.<prop> setters | #32 fixes327 + fixes349 |
| J8 | load + DOMContentLoaded via window.addEventListener | #31 fixes328 + fixes350 |
| J9 | DOMParser | #125 fixes331 |
| J10 | FormData | #124 fixes332 |
| J11 | localStorage (set / get / remove) | #46 fixes333 |
| J12 | fetch (shim presence) | #104 fixes334 |
| J13 | Event / CustomEvent / MouseEvent / KeyboardEvent constructors | #105 fixes339-340 |
| J14 | MutationObserver | #105 fixes339-340 |
| J15 | element.matches / closest / getBoundingClientRect / contains | fixes336-337 + fixes349 |
| J16 | window.scrollTo / getComputedStyle / matchMedia / Promise / addEventListener | fixes338 |
| J17 | document.title / readyState / navigator.userAgent | fixes341 |
| J18 | <details> / <summary> click-to-toggle | #110 fixes351 |
| J19 | <span hidden> attribute | #114 fixes329 |

Two structural bugs caught and fixed along the way:

• fixes349 — IIFE per-element installer. fixes342 had switched the JS init helper to duk_peval_string_noresult (which discards the eval result) but four per-element install sites in macsurf_js_dom.c still expected the function to be left on the stack for the subsequent duk_dup(-2); duk_call(1). Result: TypeError: [object Object] not callable on first use of any element wrapper, abort mid-install, every element lost classList / style / matches / closest / getBoundingClientRect / textContent setter / className setter for the rest of its lifetime. Added a macsurf_js__install_per_element helper that does eval + duk_pcall with proper stack management; refactored the four sites.
• fixes350 — window-level event dispatch. js_fire_event only invoked the inline window.on<type> handler. Listeners registered via window.addEventListener('load', fn) (parked by fixes338 in window._winListeners) were never dispatched, so load and DOMContentLoaded were unreachable through the standard JS API. Now walks _winListeners[type] and pcalls each callable entry, then runs the inline on<type> handler as before.

Diagnostic + power-user

• about:cache, about:memory, about:config, about:perf — all four now render. About:perf carries a live counters table fed by a new macsurf__site_reformat_ms global captured in html_reformat; about:config dumps the nsoption table; about:memory and about:cache surface the partition + memory + cache shape.
• #99 root cause was the URL-bar scheme heuristic. strstr(r, "://") only catches hierarchical schemes (http://, https://, file://, ftp://) — opaque schemes (about:, data:, javascript:, mailto:, resource:) use <scheme>:<opaque> with no //, so about:cache was forced to https://about:cache, nsurl parsed that as host=about path=cache, fetcher 404'd, page went blank. Replaced with a proper RFC 3986 scheme scan (ALPHA *( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "-" / "." ) terminated by :). Side effect: also unblocks data:, javascript:, mailto:, file:, resource: from URL-bar typing.

View Source — real, not invented

The old path navigated to view-source:<url> which no fetcher in this codebase recognises (NetSurf core's nsurl.h enumerates only HTTP / HTTPS / FILE / FTP / MAILTO / DATA / OTHER). Navigation silently went nowhere.

The new path uses content_get_source_data to get the raw HTML bytes already in memory, HTML-escapes them into a <pre> block, percent-encodes the whole document into a data:text/html;charset=utf-8,... URL, and navigates to that. NetSurf's html handler renders it inline. Size cap at 32 KB for V1.

The fix sequence shows up clearly in the commit history: fixes352 builds the View Source helper, fixes352a rewrites the broken data: URL fetcher stub (it was returning body="" for everything — fixed here), fixes352b switches text/plain → text/html wrapped in <pre> because MacSurf has no inline text/plain handler.

Find-in-page — real Carbon dialog

The previous "Find" was a StandardAlert reading "future round will install a Find dialog." This release installs the actual dialog.

The dialog is built programmatically with CreateNewWindow + TENew + a ModalDialog-style event loop, so no Rez source changes were needed. The kMovableModalWindowClass path was rejected by CarbonLib (errInvalidWindowAttributesForClass), so the dialog uses kDocumentWindowClass + kWindowCloseBoxAttribute — the same proven pattern as the main browser window. Last search term is cached for future Find Again wiring.

The dialog routes to browser_window_search(bw, NULL, SEARCH_FLAG_FORWARDS, term), which highlights matches via the existing text-redraw path. Important behavioural choice: after the search returns, MacSurf explicitly resets scroll to (0, 0) instead of letting NetSurf core auto-scroll to the first match. The core's scroll-to-match math produces invalid coordinates on MacSurf (e.g., scroll=(571, 335) for a content_width=949 page, stranding the user past the content edge); resetting to top keeps the highlight on the match and lets the user navigate normally.

Other CSS / layout fixes that landed in 1.3.1 → 1.4

• fixes318 — Repeating gradient + multi-stop fidelity. Closes #145 #147 #148. The shorthand-gradient extractor now preserves background-repeat, handles 3+ color stops cleanly (intermediate stop becomes the visual "second distinct" colour for pinstripe recovery), and skips matches inside repeating-linear-gradient( so the inner linear-gradient substring isn't grabbed by accident.
• fixes344b — Real alpha-aware gradient stops. Full ARGB stops stored on an outer-struct side channel (macsurf_gradient_full) so RGBA + transparent no longer get truncated to opaque RGB.
• fixes345 — Radial-gradient size + position prefix. Parses <W>px <H>px at <X>% <Y>%, captures into the radial cascade, plotter uses it.
• fixes346 — Pinstripe / repeating-pattern recovery. When the source was repeating-linear-gradient(white 0, white 1px, gray 1px, ...) (mactrove's Platinum title-bar) the first == last detection now swaps last for the first distinct intermediate colour so the gradient becomes white→gray instead of white→white solid.
• fixes347 — Pseudo-element background-image fetch. The element-level fetch at the bottom of box_construct_element was firing for elements but never for pseudos, so gen->background stayed NULL forever. Now per-pseudo html_fetch_object runs from box_construct_generate. Pair with the has_background image-url trigger so the redraw path picks the bg-image as a background source.
• fixes348 — Alpha-overlay gradient downgrade (closes #158). Platinum pinstripe gradients like linear-gradient(rgba(255,255,255,.5) 1px, transparent 1px) were rendering as harsh black-to-white gradients because the painter ignored alpha. When a stop has alpha < 0xC0 OR the gradient has the transparent-pinstripe shape, the cascade now downgrades to NONE so the underlying background-color shows through. Fully-opaque gradients are untouched.

How to upgrade

This is a MacSurf source-side release. macTLS is unchanged from v1.3.1.

• Drop-in binary: download MacSurf.sit, expand on Mac OS 9.1+ with CarbonLib 1.5+, launch.
• From source: pull the repo and rebuild in CodeWarrior 8. One file needs to be added to MacSurf.mcp for v1.4: browser/netsurf/desktop/search.c (provides browser_window_search for the new Find dialog). content/textsearch.c is already in.

What's still open

• #48 Bookmarks — menu installs and Show works, but Add is backed by a session-only local array instead of NetSurf's desktop/hotlist.c API. The hotlist rewire is queued as a follow-on.
• The long tail (~60 open issues) — modern HTML5 / JS / CSS features the project tracks separately. Nothing blocks rendering of normal pages.
• <details> cosmetic — the toggle now works on click, but pages that use display: none for collapsible regions independently of <details> will still need their own click-to-toggle handlers (they always did; this isn't regressed, it just isn't a new framework feature).

Bug reports + screenshots

Real-hardware screenshots and bug reports are exactly what this project still needs. If you've got a G3 or G4 sitting around, load 1.4 and see what breaks on the modern web. The full punch list is in docs/status.md.