Release Notes for version 1.9.8.11

This is a feature release, bringing to the public a brand new feature dedicated to website images auditing: Images Inspector.

For more details about release 1.9.8 "Teniers" please read: Visual SEO 1.9.8: Images Inspection.

New Features:

1. Crawl of images resources:
   Images pointed by the SRC attribute in IMG tags are now optionally crawled and stored locally (user can choose whether to both crawl and store).
   If stored, the program can visualize the images in the right pane "Content" window.
   If user chooses not to store images, they are anyway quickly analyzed at crawl time and their entities are stored along with their main properties without saving the actual content.
2. Images Inspector:
   A new innovative and powerful analysis tool dedicated to website images auditing. It can be used even if images were not crawled nor stored, of course it gives the best when both crawl options were enabled.
   Images Inspector permits to quickly check most common and/or advanced bulk audits of site images dramatically reducing the time normally spent by SEO consultants and agencies to the task, and further permits to highlight issues normally not looked upon because of the lack on the market (before Images Inspector) of proper tools.
3. Folder View: Folder nodes now have a new context menu option "Find all links to the folder" that launches Link Explorer to find all links pointing to any page within the selected folder.
4. Links Inspector main table has a new filtering option to locate "unsafe x-site destinations", i.e. links with target="_blank" and missing the values 'noopener' or 'noreferrer' in the rel attribute.
   To understand why this feature is important, please read https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/noopener
   A new (hidden) column "rel" has been added to help cross check with ease.

Usability / UX:

1. Pie charts labels are now much better organized: they never overlap and are connected to their own slice with a dashed line.
2. CVS Import window: made resizable (Mac) and minimal size set (Win).
3. Crawl Options: improved layout.
4. Crawl URL List window is now resizable to better visualize large lists.
5. Crawling: speed rate displayed at the end of the crawl process in Output bottom pane is now more correctly "HTTP requests per seconds" instead of "Pages per second" (more correct especially now that we can also crawl images).
6. Exception box - (also made the send report button more visible)
7. Export to Excel/CVS: now an option set in Preferences -> Project and files a setting commands whether to open the files after saving it.
   Options are ["Always", "Never", "Ask every time"]. Default value is "Ask every time". (Improvement implemented upon user's request).
8. Links Inspector: dummy nodes added to the tree views when there are more than 10000 sub-nodes (few users will see them!) are not formatted in gray italics
9. Links Inspector: localized chart label for value "Unknown" (all languages but English).
10. Links Inspector: localized tree node name for value "Unknown" (all languages but English).
11. Loading crawl session data from DB: improved precision of the progress shown.
    For new crawls (made with 1.9.8 or newer) the precision is spot on; for older crawl session (converted DBs) there could be as before a discrepancy with the actual number of items loaded.
    No one ever noticed it that we know of, but in some border-line cases (with lots of non-crawled items and/or redirects) the precision was approximate.
12. Performance Suggestions: tab listing metacharsets non-UTF-8 now shows also page titles.
13. Crawl View, Folder View and Tabular View: disabled links-related context menu items for items which are not web pages.
14. Tabular View now has a new image column to permit to spot at first site the item type thanks to a graphical icon (page, image, robots.txt, xml sitemap).
15. Tabular View: added a "Choose columns" helper button in the upper-right toolbar group. The command is of course always available for all grids in their upper-left context menu, but here it is more visible.
16. Tabular View: added a "Find value in grid" helper button in the upper-right toolbar group. The command is of course always available for all grids in their upper-left context menu, but here it is more visible.
17. Tabular View: column "Truncated" now represented with an eye-resting grayed X in case page content were truncated, and no icon in normal situation. Column is now sortable.
18. Search Results bottom pane grid now has a new image column to permit to spot at first site the item type thanks to a graphical icon (page, image, robots.txt, xml sitemap).
19. HTML/Sitemap Validator: size does not show a decimal place when expressed in bytes.
20. HTML/Sitemap Validator: size symbols now localized.
21. Uniformed everywhere used notation for Kilobytes. We now are using the JEDEC standard like Windows does.
    Previously we used a mix of JEDEC (KB = 1024), Metric (kB = 1000) and IEC (KiB = 1014), but the formally more correct IEC is not understood by laymen, and decimal is incorrect since we use the binary system, other than having a little known symbol.
    Translations are treated accordingly (French and Russian use different symbols).
    Note: we use JEDEC on both Windows and Mac versions (recent iOS versions introduced decimal system, but we felt that even adopting the decimal base, the notation "kB" is little known so we prefer to stick to common use.
22. Uniformed everywhere used notation for "bytes" (all languages).
23. "Find pages..." only inspected HTML pages; it can now search search also images, robots.txt and sitemap files (some options will be skipped if not applicable to the content type, e.g. searching withing text of an images).
24. Find in Grid icon changed to avoid confusion with the Find in Pages feature.
25. Session Picker, reduced number of columns.
26. Multi Crawl window: layout of controls within the options panel (collapsed by default) rearranged to better fit all translations.
27. [Win] Screenshot viewer: when keeping the actual size and the height of the image is smaller than the height of the container, the image now appears vertically centered.
28. [Mac] Grid Columns Picker window is now resizable (handy when the grid has many columns).
29. [Mac] Support of Alt/Command+Q shortcut to quit the application.
30. [Mac] Crawl Options: improved UI layout.
31. [Mac] Crawl Options: resized numeric up-down controls to better fit their value.
32. [Mac] Crawl URL List window: improved layout.
33. [Mac] Crawl URL List window: improved usability when visualizing options pane.
34. [Mac] Find in grid window: set the focus on the textbox when the window pops up.
35. [Mac] HTML/URL/GA/Performance Suggestions and similare reports: Summary tab links are underlined only when the mouse hovers over them so that they don't resemble a web page back from the '90s.
36. [Mac] HTML/URL/GA/Performance Suggestions and similare reports: added some left padding to the summary links column.
37. [Mac] Uniformed in dialog windows border thickness for all sides.
38. [Mac] Links Inspector, minor UI adjustment.
39. [Mac] Links Inspector: dummy nodes added to the tree views when there are more than 10000 sub-nodes (few users will see them!) are not formatted in gray italics.
40. [Mac] Links Inspector: shortcut button "Export" in "Link list" tab toolbar changed text with the selected option potentially confusing the user. Now aligned to the Windows version behaviour.
41. [Mac] Links Inspector: toolbars textboxes text-centered when it made sense (aligned to the Windows version).
42. [Mac] Links Inspector main grid, HREF column left-aligned.
43. [Mac] Minor UI adjustment in "Crawl a site" window: put some distance between TextBox(es) and between CheckBox(es)
44. [Mac] Minor UI improvement in the stoppable progress bar.
45. [Mac] Session Picker window made resizable (as in Windows version).
46. [Mac] Simplified the right-hand "Crawl Session" pane and made sure that the options fit all the available space.
47. [Mac] Start Page, recent projects grid: minor UI adjustments.
48. [Mac] Start Page, recent projects grid: reviewed layout to fit vertical scroll bar; fixed name column alignment to left.
49. [Mac] Tabular View: now fields that can span multiple lines (e.g. title, description, h1) are vertically aligned to the top.
50. [Mac] Tabular View: in case of filtered data, related controls in the upper-left toolbar appear better disposed, like in the Windows version.
51. [Mac] Verified Sites list: fixed column alignments (now they are like in the Windows version).
52. [Mac] Better date fields formatting.
53. [Mac] Several text boxed right centered (as they are in the Windows version).
54. [Mac] Tree views, selected items text color is now white to contrast with the blue background.
55. [Mac] Improved layout of the "Unexpected Error" window.

Performances:

1. Speed up improvements - under specific conditions - during the analysis phase of several reports (e.g. Custom Filters, URL Suggestions...).
2. Writing to the Output window is now more efficient, preventing the UI to freeze when in extreme conditions.
3. [Win] Tabular View: scrolling data is slightly smoother on old hardware.
4. [Mac] improved UI responsiveness when closing program tab sheets.

Various:

1. HTML Suggestions preferences, now maximum permitted value for meta description length (in characters) has been raised from 300 to 320 upon users' request.
   The reason is related to the recent change in Google SERP, where some meta description have been observed to be longer.
   We still don't encourage users to focus on character based lengths because:
   1) there is better way to employ your time
   2) characters based length have never been a thing, what to look at should be the width in pixel and the number of rows
   3) recent increased snippet length seems to be unrelated to the actual meta description content, exceeding texts seem more to be composed depending on users' query.
2. Uniformed casing notation in translations.
3. Crawl Limit Reached window now uses the expression "500 pages/images".
4. [Win] All reports: finer estimation of required memory size necessary to perform computation.

Fixes:

1. Page Images viewer: prevented crashing condition in case of embedded images with absurdly tiny data Uri (so unlikely it never occurred in real life, but you can never know).
2. Report could have crashed the program when meeting URLs with path starting with a double slash.
3. Readability Analysis: stopping elaboration took long before taking effect.
4. Fixed crashing condition that could have occurred (data dependent) when drawing some histograms with very large number of elements in a reduced client area.
5. Links Inspector: clicking on tree views items did not update the Content and DOM panels, and "View in Code" and "View in DOM" did no longer work (regression since 1.9.3).
6. Links Inspector: after selecting a page from a tab with a treeview and switching back to the tab with the main link list, the current page
   (shown in Content and DOM side panels) did not restore - was left empty - and command "View in code" and "View in DOM" could not work for the currently selected (in the grid) page.
7. Find Results, Export to Excel/CSV: export the field "Status" of the as an integer (e.g. 404) and not as the correspondent description (es. NotFound) already exported as "Status Code".
8. HTTP Issues, Export to Excel/CSVs: export the field "Status" of the as an integer (e.g. 404) and not as the correspondent description (es. NotFound) already exported as "Status Code".
9. Tabular View, Export to Excel/CSV: export the field "Status" of the as an integer (e.g. 404) and not as the correspondent description (es. NotFound) already exported as "Status Code".
10. Tabular View: when exported to Excel or CSV, for non-crawled items "Status Code" (HTTP status code in textual form) column did show a bogus negative number.
11. Tabular View: when exported to Excel or CSV, for non-crawled items "Status" column did show a bogus negative number.
12. Crawl parameters summary: parameter name corrected and made clearer.
13. Crawl Progress windows: Changed text from "Max Requests Nr.:" to "Max pages/images Nr." since that's the actual value reported.
14. Crawl Multiple Sites window: Changed text from "Maximum number of URLs:" to "Maximum number of pages/images:" since that's the actual value reported.
15. Various fixes in translations (all languages).
16. [Win] Fixed layout regression in Verified Sites window, where in case of vertical progress bar the grid did not fit the allotted space thus hiding the Remove column.
17. [Win] Data Extraction, closing the tab with an unsaved extraction expression having changed the default "extract what" field produced a crash.
18. [Mac] Data Extraction, load expression dialog window: fixed layout.
19. [Mac] Data Extraction: changing the extraction parameter "What to extract" option did not change have effect, the underlying expression only used "inner text" and the option was not persisted.
20. [Mac] Data Extraction, layout of Load Expression window fixed: now resizable, with proper text alignments and Name column that expands when resizing the window width.
21. [Mac] Crawl phase: removed causes of delays, freezes and potential hangs, and provided a much more responsive UI.
22. [Mac] "* Suggestions" reports: in the tree views used the same icon of the winforms version (an empty document) for leaf nodes.
23. [Mac] Links Inspector: prevented a crash when choosing the columns to show in the link list table.
24. [Mac] Links Inspector, tab "Link list", toolbar button "Pick columns" did not have any effect.
25. [Mac] Links Inspector: changing language did not update graphs.
26. [Mac] Links Inspector: Main link list, changing the filtering option did not have any filtering effect.
27. [Mac] Links Inspector: when searching for all the links to an exact URL (from a "* View" context menu command or from the "Page Links" link at the right) the result was correct, yet the "Match type" combo was not updated to reflect the correct "Exact URL" value.
28. [Mac] Links Inspector: prevented selecting other tabs while data is loading/processing.
29. [Mac] Links Inspector main grid columns were not sortable.
30. [Mac] Crawl Options, max download size (in KB) was 500; aligned to the Windows version (2000 KB).
31. [Mac] Craw View / Folder View - Regression: fixed a crash that could have occurred when trying to display a little used icon.
32. [Mac] Crawl phase: do not wrap texts in Output window.
33. [Mac] DOM Viewer, all attributes had as name the element name instead of the actual attribute name.
34. [Mac] Find in grid window: scroll to the row containing the found element if not visible.
35. [Mac] Fixed a crashing condition occasionally occurring when launching HTML and URL Suggestions.
36. [Mac] HTML Suggestions, tree view nodes for open/closed folder icons were inverted.
37. [Mac] HTML Suggestions: fixed columns visibility for grids "Pages missing title" and "Pages missing description".
38. [Mac] Fixed crashing condition occurring when invoking the mouse right-button option "Pick columns..." for some grids.
39. [Mac] For recoverable errors avoid quitting the application after closing the "Unexpected error" window without sending the report to the crash server.
40. [Mac] HTTP Issues panel: changing HTTP issue row with the keyboard instead than with the mouse did not cause the newly selected item to be selected in the main view.
41. [Mac] In the "Craw URL List" dialog do not crawl after pressing Cancel (could have happened if it had been previously clicked on "Crawl" and if no URLs had been imported; the crawl also produced a subsequent crash now prevented).
42. [Mac] Main tabs context menu: the entries "Close all other tabs" and "Close all tabs" must be grayed out when the tab is only one.
43. [Mac] Non-crawled items panel: changing item with the keyboard instead than with the mouse did not cause the newly selected item to be selected in the main view.
44. [Mac] Non-crawled items panel: clicking on the "robots.txt blocking directive" row link could have highlighted a wrong directive.
45. [Mac] Right pane "Session" window, made sure that the control at the bottom fits all the available space.
46. [Mac] Right and bottom panes, "Collapse" arrow icon had tooltip text "Expand" when the pane started collapsed.
47. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: fixed crashing condition occasionally occurring when "Show in code" context menu command was invoked with the panel collapsed.
48. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: fixed crashing condition when the tool highlighted part of the text, and the page was switched: if the same line was not long enough, a crash occurred; if it was long enough, the text in the very same position was wrongly highlighted with a bad user experience.
49. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: reduced memory consumption when updating the panel.
50. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: the tool did not correctly split new lines in pages where a new line was made of the CR character alone.
51. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: when "Show in code" context menu command was invoked with the panel collapsed, it was not expanded.
52. [Mac] Right pane "Content" window: switching from one page content to another did not reset scroll vertical position.
53. [Mac] Fixed crashing condition potentially occurring when processing large data sets.
54. [Mac] Page Links panel: in all languages but English appeared in the toolbar a dummy link "Find in-links" that did nothing but wast real estate. It existed in the past in the Windows version, but was superseded by the "Find pages linking to the URL" link (one of the two at the upper right corner).
55. [Mac] Progress/Session windows, Link Depth and Download time histogram graphs: Mean and Median values shown at the bottom were not read-only.
56. [Mac] "hreflang Checker", aligned columns visibility to Windows version.
57. [Mac] Bottom and right panes layout changed to to match the Windows version layout.
58. [Mac] Resizing a left or bottom tool when it was collapsed resulted in a weird UI behaviour.
59. [Mac] Many grid columns were missing the tooltip when it was available in the Windows version.
60. [Mac] Session Picker columns were not sortable.
61. [Mac] Session Picker, double-clicking on the columns header caused the selected row to be picked.
62. [Mac] Start Page, sessions grid: double-clicking on the columns header caused the selected row to be picked.