extension-v1.17.0

[extension-v1.17.0] - 2024-10-30: Halloween special: major UI and state display improvements, fine-grained Work offline mode, add-on reloading with its state preserved, new options, etc

In related news, I have 💸☕ a Patreon account now.

Fixed: Possibly important

• Core:

  • Fixed a bug in upgradeConfig that was resetting bucket settings to their default values or upgrade to extension-v1.13.0.
    So, this is no longer relevant, but still.
    Also, refactored code there to prevent such errors in the future.

    However, just in case, if you previously set bucket settings to something other than their default values and those settings are important to you, you should probably check your settings to ensure everything there is set as you expect it to be.

Changed: Important UI

• Core + Popup UI + Documentation:

  • Renamed failed state and related failed* stats to unarchived state and unarchived* stats.
    Introduced a new failed stat that is now a sum of unstashed and unarchived stats.
    Edited the popup UI and the other pages appropriately.

    This makes documentation's terminology more consistent, and simplifies UI a bit.

    In particular, the Retry button of Queued/Failed stat line will both retry stashing unstashed and archiving unarchived reqres now.

• Popup UI:

  • Reworked the whole thing quite a bit:

    • Improved option names and help strings.
    • Sorted sections and options to follow a more logically consistent order.
    • Improved layout.
    • Fixed some typos there.

  • From now on, setting Bucket for the current tab will set Bucket for its new children too, similar to how the rest of those settings work.

  • From now on, setting any of the Bucket settings to nothing will reset it to the parent/default value.
    I.e.:

    • Setting Bucket of This tab's new children to nothing will reset it to Bucket value of This tab.
    • Setting Bucket of This tab to nothing will reset it to Bucket value of New root tabs.
    • Setting Bucket of New root tabs to nothing will reset it to default.

• The Help page:

  • The previous "Desktop" JavaScript-generated layout became columns CSS layout and JS-operation mode, while the "Mobile" JavaScript-generated layout became linear CSS layout and JS-operation mode.
    The page will now automatically switch between these two layouts and modes synchronously, depending on viewport width.

    (As before, in linear mode hovering over a link does nothing, but in columns mode, hovering over a link referring to a target in popup UI scrolls the popup UI column to that target and highlights it.)

    I.e., this means that on a Desktop browser, you can now zoom the Help page to arbitrary zoom levels and it will just switch between layouts and link-hover behaviors depending on available viewport width.

  • Greatly improved the styling of all links and documented it in the "Conventions" section.

• All internal pages:

  • All internal pages now color-code links depending on where they point to, using exactly the same CSS as the Help page.

  • All pages now use the same history state handling behaviour.

    I.e., using the "Back" button of your browser will now not only go back, but also highlight the last link you clicked.

  • All documentation pages now set viewport width to device-width, set content's max-width to 900px and width to 100% - padding, preventing horizontal scroll, when possible.

  • Improved the CSS styling in general.

• Core + Popup UI + General UI:

  • Implemented a new popup UI tristate toggle named Color scheme which allows Hoardy-Web's color-scheme to be different from the browser's default.

  • Implemented a mechanism and popup UI settings for applying additional themes and experimental features.

  • And then I looked at the date. Which is why ◥▅◤◢▅◣◥▅◤ Hoardy-Web now has 🦇 Halloween mode. ◥▅◤◢▅◣◥▅◤.

  • Also, from now on, the neutral states of tristate toggles are displayed with toggle knobs being in the middle of the things, not on their left.
    This is not a political statement.
    This mans that all tristate toggles, from left to right, now go false -> null -> true both internally (exactly as they did before) and externally (which is new).

Changed: State display

• Core + Toolbar button + Icons:

  • Replaced toolbar button's icons representing Cartesian products of other icons with animations.

    In other words, the previous "this tab has limbo mode enabled while this tab's children do not" icon will now instead be represented with an animation that switches between "this tab has limbo mode enabled" and "this tab is idle" icons instead.

    This both takes less space in the XPI/CRX, makes for a cuter UI, and is the only reasonable solution when the core wants to display more than two icons at the same time.

  • Improved toolbar button's badge and title format a bit.

    "This tab" part goes first now, then "its new children", then "globally".

    Also, the order of sub-parts of those strings is more consistent now.

  • From now on, internal UI updater will generate icon animation frames for all important statuses and setting states.

    • When per-tab and per-tab's-new-children animation frames are equal, the repeated part will be elided.
    • When per-tab and per-tab's-new-children animation frames differ, the main icon will be inserted at the end to make it obvious when the animation loop restarts (otherwise, it's easy to interpret such animation loops incorrectly).

  • The update frequency of toolbar button's icon, badge, and title now depends on the amount of not yet done stuff still queued in the core.

    I.e., from now on, when the core has a lot of stuff to do (like when re-archiving thousands of reqres at the same time), it will start updating toolbar button's properties less to trade update latency for improved performance, and vice versa.

  • Greatly improved performance of state display updates. It's uses 2-1000x less CPU now, depending on what the core is doing.

• Icons:

  • Renamed the error icon to failed and added a new error icon.

    From now on, the failed icon will only be used for archival/stashing errors, while the error icon will only be used for internal errors (i.e. bugs).

  • Improved all icons to make them more visually distinct when they are being rendered at 48x48 or less, both in light and dark mode.

  • On Chromium, all icons are now rendered with transparent backgrounds, so now they will look nice in the dark mode too.

Added: State display

• Core + Popup UI + Toolbar button:

  • From now on, popup UI and toolbar button's badge and title will display information about currently running internal actions.

    (Implementing this took a surprising amount of effort in improvements to infrastructure code.)

• Core + Toolbar button + Icons:

  • Added a new in_limbo icon for "this tab has data in limbo" status.
    Unlike most other icons, this icon will never be used alone, it will always be an animation frame of something longer.

• Core + Popup UI + Toolbar button:

  • Implemented Animate toolbar icon every setting for controlling toolbar icon animation speed.

Fixed: State display

• Core + Toolbar button:

  • Fixed a bunch of bugs that prevented updates to toolbar button's icon and badge in some cases.

  • The icon and the badge will no longer get stuck when the core is very busy, like when re-archiving a lot of stuff all at once.

Added: Work offline mode

• Core + Popup UI + Toolbar button + Icons + Documentation:

  • Implemented Work offline mode, options, their popup UI, shortcuts, and icons.

    This mode does the same thing as File > Work Offline checkbox of Firefox, except it supports per-tab/per-other-origin operation, not just the whole-browser one.
    Also, enabling any these options will not break requests that are still in flight, and the requests they do cancel can be logged.

    That is, enabling Work offline in a tab will start canceling all new requests that tab generates, and the resulting canceled reqres will get logged if Track new requests option is enabled in the same tab.
    Similarly for background tasks and other origins.

    This can be generally useful for debugging your own websites with dynamic responsive CSS, or if you just want to prevent a tab from accessing the network for some reason.

    However, the main reason this exists is that the files generated by hoardy-web export mirror do not get scrubbed absolutely correctly at the moment, and the resulting pages can end up with some references to remote resources (in cases when an exported page uses some rare HTML and CSS tag combinations, or lazy-load images via JavaScript, but still).
    With Work offline options enabled in a tab, you can now be sure that opening pages generated by hoardy-web export mirror won't send any requests to the network.

    In fact, from now on, by default, Hoardy-Web will enable Work offline in all tabs pointing to file: URLs.
    This can be disabled in the settings.

  • Documented it in more detain on the Help page.

  • Added a new offline toolbar icon to display the above state.

Added: Reloading with state preserved

• Core + Popup UI + Documentation:

  • Implemented reloadSelf action that reloads the add-on while preserving its state.

    This action is different from similar Reload buttons in browser's own UI in that triggering this action will reload the add-on while preserving its state.
    Meanwhile, using the browser's buttons will reset everything and loose all reqres that are both unarchived and unstashed.

  • Added a popup UI button for triggering this action.
    (The button is only shown when a new version is available, unless debugging is enabled.)

  • Implemented Auto-reload on updates setting to automate away clicking of that button on updates.
    Though, it is currently disabled by default, because this feature is a bit experimental at the moment.

  • Documented it a little bit on the Help page.

  • That is, from now on, after the browser notifies the add-on that it ready to be updated, the popup UI will display a button allowing you to reload it, so that the browser could load the new version instead.
    Alternatively, you can now enable Auto-reload on updates and it would do that automatically.

Added: Options

• Core + Popup UI:

  • Implemented Export via 'saveAs' > Bundle dumps option as separate toggle instead of forcing you into set the maximum size to 0 to get the same effect.

  • Implemented Include in global snapshots per-tab/per-origin setting.

    I.e., you can now exclude specific tabs from being included in all-tab DOM-snapshots even when Track new requests option is enabled.

• Notifications + Popup UI:

  • Implemented Notify about 'problematic' reqres per-tab/per-origin setting.

    I.e., you can now exclude specific tabs from generating notifications about problematic reqres even when Generate notifications about > ... new 'problematic' reqres option is enabled.

Changed: Misc

• Notifications + Documentation:

  • From now on, clicking an error notification will open the relevant section of the Help page while doing nothing for other notifications.

  • Also, improved that section a little bit.

• Documentation:

  • Moved re-archival instructions from the top-level README.md to
    the Help page and generalized them a bit.

  • Improved many random bits of documentation in random places.

• Core:

  • On Chromium, there will no longer be duplicates in reqres errors lists.

  • From now on, when you close a tab, all in-flight reqres in it will be emitted with *::capture::EMIT_FORCED::BY_CLOSED_TAB error set.
    Before, some of them sometimes finished with webRequest::*_ABORT errors instead.

  • Refactored a lot of internal stuff, simplifying how many internal things are done.

Added: Misc

• Icons:

  • build.sh now has a new tiles target which generates pretty tile images from the icons on both light and dark backgrounds.
    This helps with debugging visual issues there.

    Also, both Patreon and GitHub are now configured to use one of the resulting images as og:image.
    For cuteness!

Fixed: Misc

• Core + Documentation:

  • Fixed handling of interactions between page scrolling, node hilighting, and help tooltips.

    I.e., on the Help page, highlighting an option in the popup UI by hovering over a link there, and then clicking on the help tooltip of the highlighted option will no longer make the UI look weird.

• Core + Notifications:

  • Fixed a small bug preventing no longer relevant notifications about unarchived reqres from being closed automatically.