Tuesday, April 8, 2008

XML, Cocoa, JavaScript, Java and other stuff.

Fluid 0.8.7 with URL whitelists/blacklists and custom user-agent strings

Fluid 0.8.7 is out, with two major features:

  1. URL Whitelists and Blacklists for allowing/disallowing browsing to matched URL patterns.
  2. Custom User-Agent strings. Choose from popular presets, our provide your own.

The whitelist feature is located in the Preference Window under the “Advanced” pane, while the User-Agent feature is located in each SSB’s Application menu in the main menu.

The whitelist feature is actually really huge for Fluid. This allows so much more flexibility in making SSBs “just work” out of the box, as well as offering the “pro” user tons of power in specifying what webapps she wants her SSB to handle.

How do whitelists work? Fluid SSBs are targeted browsers that only browse the “home website” you provide when you create them. Previously, Fluid would just take a gander at the “Home URL” you provided for your SSB, and try to make educated guesses about what subsequent URLs were part of the same URL domain or broader website/webapp. If you browse to a page that is outside this URL domain or website, Fluid kicks you out to the system default web browser. However, It’s inevitable that Fluid will occasionally be wrong when guessing.

Whitelists allow me to add more special cases out of the box for more websites more easily. But more importantly, the give the end user the power to fix any problem they encounter, and let their SSB know exactly what they consider part of their webapp.

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