Release Notes for version 2.4.0.11

This feature release enriches the "Links Inspector" to make it easier to inspect redirect chain and to do things like auditing affiliate marketing links.
For more details about release 2.4 "Beagle Unchained" please read: Visual SEO 2.4: audit redirect chains.

New Features:

1. Links Inspector: a new match type "All links" added to the toolbox. It's the fastest to compute as it doesn't need to match a URL pattern when extracting links (thus the "Domain/URL to match" field is disabled and ignored for this option).
   This was the missing option, originally kept apart because on medium-big sized websites could easily fetch and hold in memory the data of million of links.
   Computers become more powerful and ship with more memory now, and we felt average hardware used for Visual SEO Studio could handle the task, as already many users used the "Domain" option for the crawled website, which already by itself can extract huge quantities of link.
2. Links Inspector, added specific "Redirect chains" filter in the main Link List table.
   Previously redirects were included in the "Broken links" filter, stretching a bit the definition of broken link, but now "Broken links" are only links leading to a 404 or 410 HTTP status code.
   This changes comes along the introduction of the new column "Redirect chain" that shows the redirect chain in a multi-line text cell.
3. Links Inspector: added new column "Final landing page" to the main table.
   When the link leads to a redirect chain, it states the final URL where the user lands.
4. Links Inspector: added new column "Redirect chain" to the main table.
   In case the destination URL of the link is redirected, its shows the complete redirect chain up until its end.
   This is a multi-line field, each line showing the response code and the request URL.
5. Links Inspector: added new column "Redirect loops" to the main table.
   It states whether a redirect chain is potentially infinite.

Usability / UX:

1. Crawling: if the spider met a redirected URL, and this last was redirected to an external URL, it correctly stopped following the redirection, but left no record of the block.
   Now (if no "Crawl external links" option is selected) it shows a node of "Non-crawled item" with detail "Redirected to external URL".
2. Links Inspector: in case of a redirect chain where the last redirection was not followed for whatever reason, the "Destination status" column cell tooltip now shows at the end of the redirect chain (where the SEO spider stopped) the URL to which the last redirect points to, prefixed by the text "--> " to give a better understanding of where the chain was leading to.
   The same happens in the new "Redirect chain" column content.
3. Links Inspector: in case of detected redirect loop the "destination status" column cell tooltip now shows at the end of the redirect chain (where the SEO spider stopped to avoid an infinite loop) the URL causing the loop (the URL to which the last redirect points to) prefixed by the text "--> " to give a better understanding of how the circular reference occurs.
   The same happens in the new "Redirect chain" column content.
4. Links Inspector: in case of detected redirect loop the "destination status" column now shows at the end of the redirect chain (where the SEO spider stopped to avoid an infinite loop) the text "; [...]" to give a visual clue that the chain could be potentially infinite.
5. Links Inspector: in case of non-explored pages due to reasons like timeouts, protocol violations, robots.txt blocking, etc. the destination status column shows such status now in between square brackets to improve legibility.
   The same happens in the cell tooltip and in the new "Redirect chain" column content.
6. Crawling: if the spider met a redirected URL, and this last was blocked by a robots.txt file, it correctly stopped following the redirection, but left no record of the block.
   Now (if no "Ignore robots.txt Disallow" option is selected) it shows a node of "Non-crawled item" with detail "Denied by robots.txt".
7. Export to Excel: now rows with multi-line cell values are exported with row height sufficient to show all cell lines.
8. Export to Excel: now cell content is vertically aligned, as it displays better in case of multi-line cell values.
9. [Mac] Export to Excel: now header rows of the exported spreadsheet have enough height to display wrapped header text.
10. [Mac] Added dark mode support for pie and histogram charts.
11. [Mac] darkened unselected header tabs in order to better identify the selected one.
12. [Mac] In all grids: cell content can now be copied, or viewed in a separate dialog, by using the context menu.

Performances:

1. Links Inspector, main table: Sped-up sorting of "Destination status" column.

Fixes:

1. When dealing with redirected URLS, if the "Redirected To" URL ("Location" HTTP header) had query string parameters, these were not normalized when searched within the main view, resulting in functions like (for example) the "Go to Redirection URL" not to find the node/row in the main view.
2. Crawling: if the spider met a redirected URL, it correctly checked if it was blocked by a robots.txt file, but didn't take into account the possible "Ignore robots.txt Disallow" option.
3. Links Inspector: when computing link chains, the tool stopped at a maximum of 5 hops (which was the maximum allowed up to rel. 2.3.2, because googlebot traditionally followed up to five redirections), but since rel. 2.3.3 we allow to follow up to 10 hops (because recently Google released technical documentation where they explain that in some instances they follow up to 10 hops), so we adapted the Links Inspector to comply up to the maximum.
4. Export to CSV: the program did not handle correctly exporting cell values containing new lines.
   Now if supports them according to RFC 4180 (Note: we noticed unfortunately that LibreOffice does a poor job importing them: while the import preview works fine and shows the cells with multiline values correctly, the actual import mis-interpret the newlines (unless you specify a quote mark as field separator); Google Sheets imports them out-of-the-box though).
5. [Mac] Grid cells did not provide a way to show content of cells spanning over their size; now they display it in a tooltip.
6. [Mac] Grid tooltips (up to the previous version only shown for column headers) did not reset when the mouse was leaving the grid, resulting in the grid sometimes showing the wrong/old tooltip.
7. [Mac] Since miniatures are not available on Mac, miniature options are now not shown in preferences dialog.
8. Page Images tool, fixed crash condition (occurred to three real users).