3. What's New in this Release

Privoxy 3.0.20 is a beta release. The changes since 3.0.19 stable are:

• Bug fixes:

  • Client sockets are now properly shutdown and drained before being closed. This fixes page truncation issues with clients that aggressively pipeline data on platforms that otherwise discard already written data. The issue mainly affected Opera users and was initially reported by Kevin in #3464439, szotsaki provided additional information to track down the cause.

  • Fix latency calculation for shared connections (disabled by default). It was broken since their introduction in 2009. The calculated latency for most connections would be 0 in which case the timeout detection failed to account for the real latency.

  • Reject URLs with invalid port. Previously they were parsed incorrectly and characters between the port number and the first slash were silently dropped as shown by curl test 187.

  • The default-server-timeout and socket-timeout directives accept 0 as valid value.

  • Fix a race condition on Windows that could cause Privoxy to become unresponsive after toggling it on or off through the taskbar icon. Reported by Tim H. in #3525694.

  • Fix the compilation on Windows when configured without IPv6 support.

  • Fix an assertion that could cause debug builds to abort() in case of socks5 connection failures with "debug 2" enabled.

  • Fix an assertion that could cause debug builds to abort() if a filter contained nul bytes in the replacement text.

• General improvements:

  • Significantly improved keep-alive support for both client and server connections.

  • New debug log level 65536 which logs all actions that were applied to the request.

  • New directive client-header-order to forward client headers in a different order than the one in which they arrived.

  • New directive tolerate-pipelining to allow client-side pipelining. If enabled (3.0.20 beta enables it by default), Privoxy will keep pipelined client requests around to deal with them once the current request has been served.

  • New --config-test option to let Privoxy exit after checking whether or not the configuration seems valid. The limitations noted in TODO #22 and #23 still apply. Based on a patch by Ramkumar Chinchani.

  • New limit-cookie-lifetime{} action to let cookies expire before the end of the session. Suggested by Rick Sykes in #1049575.

  • Increase the hard-coded maximum number of actions and filter files from 10 to 30 (each). It doesn't significantly affect Privoxy's memory usage and recompiling wasn't an option for all Privoxy users that reached the limit.

  • Add support for chunk-encoded client request bodies. Previously chunk-encoded request bodies weren't guaranteed to be forwarded correctly, so this can also be considered a bug fix although chunk-encoded request bodies aren't commonly used in the real world.

  • Add support for Tor's optimistic-data SOCKS extension, which can reduce the latency for requests on newly created connections. Currently only the headers are sent optimistically and only if the client request has already been read completely which rules out requests with large bodies.

  • After preventing the client from pipelining, don't signal keep-alive intentions. When looking at the response headers alone, it previously wasn't obvious from the client's perspective that no additional responses should be expected.

  • Stop considering client sockets tainted after receiving a request with body. It hasn't been necessary for a while now and unnecessarily causes test failures when using curl's test suite.

  • Allow HTTP/1.0 clients to signal interest in keep-alive through the Proxy-Connection header. While such client are rare in the real world, it doesn't hurt and couple of curl tests rely on it.

  • Only remove duplicated Content-Type headers when filters are enabled. If they are not it doesn't cause ill effects and the user might not want it. Downgrade the removal message to LOG_LEVEL_HEADER to clarify that it's not an error in Privoxy and is unlikely to cause any problems in general. Anonymously reported in #3599335.

  • Set the socket option SO_LINGER for the client socket.

  • Move several variable declarations to the beginning of their code block. It's required when compiling with gcc 2.95 which is still used on some platforms. Initial patch submitted by Simon South in #3564815.

  • Optionally try to sanity-check strptime() results before trusting them. Broken strptime() implementations have caused problems in the past and the most recent offender seems to be FreeBSD's libc (standards/173421).

  • When filtering is enabled, let Range headers pass if the range starts at the beginning. This should work around (or at least reduce) the video playback issues with various Apple clients as reported by Duc in #3426305.

  • Do not confuse a client hanging up with a connection time out. If a client closes its side of the connection without sending a request line, do not send the CLIENT_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_RESPONSE, but report the condition properly.

  • Allow closing curly braces as part of action values as long as they are escaped.

  • On Windows, the logfile is now written before showing the GUI error message which blocks until the user acknowledges it. Reported by Adriaan in #3593603.

  • Remove an unreasonable parameter limit in the CGI interface. The new parameter limit depends on the memory available and is currently unlikely to be reachable, due to other limits in both Privoxy and common clients. Reported by Andrew on ijbswa-users@.

  • Decrease the chances of parse failures after requests with unsupported methods were sent to the CGI interface.

• Action file improvements:

  • Remove the comment that indicated that updated default.action versions are released on their own.

  • Block 'optimize.indieclick.com/' and 'optimized-by.rubiconproject.com/'

  • Unblock 'adjamblog.wordpress.com/' and 'adjamblog.files.wordpress.com/'. Reported by Ryan Farmer in #3496116.

  • Unblock '/.*Bugtracker'. Reported by pwhk in #3522341.

  • Add test URLs for '.freebsd.org' and '.watson.org'.

  • Unblock '.urbandictionary.com/popular'.

  • Block '.adnxs.com/'.

  • Block 'farm.plista.com/widgetdata.php'.

  • Block 'rotation.linuxnewmedia.com/'.

  • Block 'reklamy.sfd.pl/'. Reported by kacperdominik in #3399948.

  • Block 'g.adspeed.net/'.

  • Unblock 'websupport.wdc.com/'. Reported by Adam Piggot in #3577851.

  • Block '/openx/www/delivery/'.

  • Disable fast-redirects for '.googleapis.com/'.

  • Block 'imp.double.net/'. Reported by David Bo in #3070411.

  • Block 'gm-link.com/' which is used for email tracking. Reported by David Bo in #1812733.

  • Verify that requests to "bwp." are blocked. URL taken from #1736879 submitted by Francois Marier.

  • Block '/.*bannerid='. Reported by Adam Piggott in #2975779.

  • Block 'cltomedia.info/delivery/' and '.adexprt.com/'. Anonymously reported in #2965254.

  • Block 'de17a.com/'. Reported by David Bo in #3061472.

  • Block 'oskar.tradera.com/'. Reported by David Bo in #3060596.

  • Block '/scripts/webtrends\.js'. Reported by johnd16 in #3002729.

  • Block requests for 'pool.*.adhese.com/'. Reported by johnd16 in #3002716.

  • Update path pattern for Coremetrics and add tests. Pattern and URLs submitted by Adam Piggott #3168443.

  • Enable +fast-redirects{check-decoded-url} for 'tr.anp.se/'. Reported by David Bo in #3268832.

  • Unblock '.conrad.se/newsletter/banners/'. Reported by David Bo in #3413824.

  • Block '.tynt.com/'. Reported by Dan Stahlke in #3421767.

  • Unblock '.bbci.co.uk/radio/'. Reported by Adam Piggott in #3569603.

  • Block requests to 'service.maxymiser.net/'. Reported by johnd16 in #3118401 (with a previous URL).

  • Disable fast-redirects for Google's "let's pretend your computer is infected" page.

  • Unblock '/.*download' to resolve actionsfile feedback #3498129. Submitted by Steven Kolins (soundcloud.com not working).

  • Unblock '.wlxrs.com/' which is required by hotmail.com. Fixes #3413827 submitted by David Bo.

  • Add two unblock patterns for popup radio and TV players. Submitted by Adam Piggott in #3596089.

• Filter file improvements & bug fixes:

  • Add a referer tagger.

  • Reduce the likelihood that the google filter messes up HTML-generating JavaScript. Reported by Zeno Kugy in #3520260.

• Documentation improvements:

  • Revised all OS X sections due to new packaging module (OSXPackageBuilder).

  • Update the list of supported operating systems to clarify that all Windows versions after 95 are expected to work and note that the platform-specific code for AmigaOS and QNX currently isn't maintained.

  • Update 'Signals' section, the only explicitly handled signals are SIGINT, SIGTERM and SIGHUP.

  • Add Haiku to the list of operating systems on which Privoxy is known to run.

  • Add DragonFly to the list of BSDs on which Privoxy is known to run.

  • Removed references to redhat-specific documentation set since it no longer exists.

  • Removed references to building PDFs since we no longer do so.

  • Multiple listen-address directives are supported since 3.0.18, correct the documentation to say so.

  • Remove bogus section about long and short being preferable to int.

  • Corrected some Internet JunkBuster references to Privoxy.

  • Removed references to www.junkbusters.com since it is no longer maintained. Reported by Angelina Matson.

  • Various grammar and spelling corrections

  • Add a client-header-tagger{} example for disabling filtering for range requests.

  • Correct a URL in the "Privoxy with Tor" FAQ.

  • Spell 'refresh-tags' correctly. Reported by Don in #3571927.

  • Sort manpage options alphabetically.

  • Remove an incorrect sentence in the toggle section. The toggle state doesn't affect whether or not the Windows version uses the tray icon. Reported by Zeno Kugy in #3596395.

  • Add new contributors since 3.0.19.

• Log message improvements:

  • When stopping to watch a client socket due to pipelining, additionally log the socket number.

  • Log the client socket and its condition before closing it. This makes it more obvious that the socket actually gets closed and should help when diagnosing problems like #3464439.

  • In case of SOCKS5 failures, do not explicitly log the server's response. It hasn't helped so far and the response can already be logged by enabling "debug 32768" anyway. This reverts v1.81 and the follow-up bug fix v1.84.

  • Relocate the connection-accepted message from listen_loop() to serve(). This way it's printed by the thread that is actually serving the connection which is nice when grepping for thread ids in log files.

• Code cleanups:

  • Remove compatibility layer for versions prior to 3.0 since it has been obsolete for more than 10 years now.

  • Remove the ijb_isupper() and ijb_tolower() macros from parsers.c since they aren't used in this file.

  • Removed the 'Functions declared include:' comment sections since they tend to be incomplete, incorrect and out of date and the benefit seems questionable.

  • Various comment grammar and comprehensibility improvements.

  • Remove a pointless fflush() call in chat(). Flushing all streams pretty much all the time for no obvious reason is ridiculous.

  • Relocate ijb_isupper()'s definition to project.h and get the ijb_tolower() definition from there, too.

  • Relocate ijb_isdigit()'s definition to project.h.

  • Rename ijb_foo macros to privoxy_foo.

  • Add malloc_or_die() which will allow to simplify code paths where malloc() failures don't need to be handled gracefully.

  • Add strdup_or_die() which will allow to simplify code paths where strdup() failures don't need to be handled gracefully.

  • Replace strdup() calls with strdup_or_die() calls where it's safe and simplifies the code.

  • Fix white-space around parentheses.

  • Add missing white-space behind if's and the following parentheses.

  • Unwrap a memcpy() call in resolve_hostname_to_ip().

  • Declare pcrs_get_delimiter()'s delimiters[] static const.

  • Various optimisations to remove dead code and merge inefficient code structures for improved clarity, performance or code compactness.

  • Various data type corrections.

  • Change visibility of several code segments when compiling without FEATURE_CONNECTION_KEEP_ALIVE enabled for clarity.

  • In pcrs_get_delimiter(), do not use delimiters outside the ASCII range. Fixes a clang complaint.

  • Fix an error message in get_last_url() nobody is supposed to see. Reported by Matthew Fischer in #3507301.

  • Fix a typo in the no-zlib-support complaint. Patch submitted by Matthew Fischer in #3507304.

  • Shorten ssplit()'s prototype by removing the last two arguments. We always want to skip empty fields and ignore leading delimiters, so having parameters for this only complicates the API.

  • Use an enum for the type of the action value.

  • Rename action_name's member takes_value to value_type as it isn't used as boolean.

  • Turn family mismatches in match_sockaddr() into fatal errors.

  • Let enlist_unique_header() verify that the caller didn't pass a header containing either \r or \n.

  • Change the hashes used in load_config() to unsigned int. That's what hash_string() actually returns and using a potentially larger type is at best useless.

  • Use privoxy_tolower() instead of vanilla tolower() with manual casting of the argument.

  • Catch ssplit() failures in parse_cgi_parameters().

• Privoxy-Regression-Test:

  • Add an 'Overwrite condition' directive to skip any matching tests before it. As it has a global scope, using it is more convenient than clowning around with the Ignore directive.

  • Log to STDOUT instead of STDERR.

  • Include the Privoxy version in the output.

  • Various grammar and spelling corrections in documentation and code.

  • Additional tests for range requests with filtering enabled.

  • Tests with mostly invalid range request.

  • Add a couple of hide-if-modified-since{} tests with different date formats.

  • Cleaned up the format of the regression-tests.action file to match the format of default.action.

  • Remove the "Copyright" line from print_version(). When using --help, every line of screen space matters and thus shouldn't be wasted on things the user doesn't care about.

• Privoxy-Log-Parser:

  • Improve the --statistics performance by skipping sanity checks for input that shouldn't affect the results anyway. Add a --strict-checks option that enables some of the checks again, just in case anybody cares.

  • The distribution of client requests per connection is included in the --statistic output.

  • The --accept-unknown-messages option has been removed and the behavior is now the default.

  • Accept and (mostly) highlight new log messages introduced with Privoxy 3.0.20.

• uagen:

  • Bump generated Firefox version to 17.

• GNUmakefile improvements:

  • The dok-tidy target no longer taints documents with a tidy-mark

  • Change RA_MODE from 0664 to 0644. Suggested by Markus Dittrich in #3505445.

  • Remove tidy's clean flag as it changes the scope of attributes. Link-specific colors end up being applied to all text. Reported by Adam Piggott in #3569551.

  • Leave it up to the user whether or not smart tags are inserted.

  • Let w3m itself do the line wrapping for the config file. It works better than fmt as it can honour pre tags causing less unintentional line breaks.

  • Ditch a pointless '-r' passed to rm to delete files.

  • The config-file target now requires less manual intervention and updates the original config.

  • Change WDUMP to generate ASCII. Add WDUMP_UTF8 to allow UTF-8 in the AUTHORS file so the names are right.

  • Stop pretending that lynx and links are supported for the documentation.

• configure improvements:

  • On Haiku, do not pass -lpthread to the compiler. Haiku's pthreads implementation is contained in its system library, libroot, so no additional library needs to be searched. Patch submitted by Simon South in #3564815.

  • Additional Haiku-specific improvements. Disable checks intended for multi-user systems as Haiku is presently single-user. Group Haiku-specific settings in their own section, following the pattern for Solaris, OS/2 and AmigaOS. Add additional library-related settings to remove the need for providing configure with custom LDFLAGS. Submitted by Simon South in #3574538.