Visual SEO Studio Changelog

What's new in Visual SEO Studio 2.5.3.1

Feb 26, 2023

Usability / UX:
[Mac] Added progress bar in Verified Sites dialog (it was missing).
Various:
Google verification: updated application to comply with new Google OAuth requirements.
At the moment you can no longer switch among Google accounts, you have to invalidate and authorize again.
Options form, removed Google Search Console accounts window. We removed it because incompatible with the new specs for Google OAuth.
We have are discussing internally how to restore it to make multi-account (still possible with the new implementation) easier.
Crawling: better support for TLS 1.3 secure connections.
At startup the program will offer to update the project file to a new format. This is in preparation of new features that will soon be published.
Fixes:
[Mac] Fixed UI issue in Verified Sites grid, where the texts were wrongly either green or red instead of the system text color.
[Mac] Fixed potential crash that could have occurred in some specific cases when setting network credentials to use in HTTP requests.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.5.2.1 (Aug 19, 2022)

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.5.1.3 (Jun 24, 2022)

New Features:
"Page Links" bottom pane: added (initially hidden) "CSS path" column, like in Links Inspector. The piece of information was already there, but users had no way to visualize it from the bottom panel.
Usability / UX:
DOM Viewer: selected node was little readable as it maintained the color scheme with a blue background.
Various:
[Win] Minimal .Net Framework requirement changed to 4.6.2 since MS is ending support for 4.6.1 version)
Improved diagnostics in case of crash when accessing a DB project.
Crawling, added support for new Bing Desktop and Mobile user-agents. Legacy bingbot user agent are kept and marked with the "legacy" notation aside their friendly name.
Page search and Snippets: page inner text and custom extraction included in "Inner Text" also the /html/head title. While this is technically correct, it does not meet user expectations. Now the "Inner Text" refers only to content potentially visible, within the /html/body.
Fixes:
[Mac] URL Suggestions: fixed crash that was occurring in most instances when the report was launched with the UI language set to English.
[Win] DOM Viewer, fixed crashing condition when the tool tried to highlight a text longer than 32000 characters. Now in such case the text is truncated and shown ending with " [...] " to fit the maximum size limit.
Fixed crashing condition that might occur when a user closed the help window and the main program window almost at the same time.
Performance suggestions: in some cases a non-blocking script could have been reported as blocking if placed before a HTML comment even if it was placed after the latest non-script tag (and thus it would be non-blocking).
[Win] DOM Viewer: drawing of colored parts (attributes, attribute values, etc.) of element nodes is now more precise and pleasant to look at. They previously were often overlapping.
[Win] DOM Viewer: text nodes and selected nodes representation did strip away characters "&" and ";" in HTML character entities, occasionally underscoring the character following the ampersand.
Links Inspector: column name "CSS path" was not translated to other languages.
Fixed crashing condition occurred in re-generating an histogram after a mouse-up event in a very corner case situation.
Images Inspector and Page Links view: internal redundant white spaces were not stripped out.
Images Inspector and Page Links view: in case of link wrapping an IMG tag, alt attribute was used, but was not stripped of redundant white spaces.
Crawling: links found in the encoded form, like https://www.example.com/ where not correctly recognized and discarded by the spider.
[Win] Copyright notices updated to show year 2022.
Choosing a project name containing the ';' column character caused the program to crash. Now it is treated as an invalid character.
[Mac] Fixed crashing condition occurred when changing UI language in Data Extraction when at least a filter was populated.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.5.0.11 (Feb 3, 2022)

New Features:
Site crawling tree view, Crawl View and Folder View: added new "Truncated" column to make evident at first sight when a resource is not extracted fully.
This was requested by several users.
Truncated pages often are truncated before the actual body content and may not let the tool extract any link or other contents.
Crawl Sitemap: added "Maximum Download size" option.
Usability / UX:
Links Inspector, added navigation chart to the main table and to the summary table; when bars are clicked, the corresponding filter is applied on the main link list.
Images Inspector, added navigation chart to the main table and to the summary table; when bars are clicked, the corresponding filter is applied on the main link list.
Links inspector, enabled navigation to the tabs directly by clicking on the pie charts in Summary page.
Image Inspector, enabled navigating to the tabs directly by clicking on the pie charts in Summary page.
Links inspector, suggestion tree tabs: now clicking on the pie chart slices you can select the related first-level element on the right-side tree view.
Images inspector, suggestion tree tabs: now clicking on the pie chart slices you can select the related first-level element on the right-side tree view.
Links Inspector, main list: filter combo box moved first in the above-the-table toolbar, above the new graph selector with the same function.
Images Inspector, main list: filter combo box moved first in the above-the-table toolbar, above the new graph selector with the same function.
Image Inspector, summary page pie charts: now legend is shown on the left, and only showing the values in pie slide labels.
Links Inspector, summary page pie charts: now legend is shown on the left, and only showing the values in pie slide labels.
Links Inspector: Graph in summary page have slices now colored based on the value, when a specific color is more appropriate, instead of the color being blindly assigned. For example, we avoid representing a slice in red when the user could be mislead to think it refers to an error.
Images Inspector: Graph in summary page have slices now colored based on the value, when a specific color is more appropriate, instead of the color being blindly assigned. For example, when a slice refers to cases of errors, the pie slice will be represented in red.
Images Inspector: in the main image list tab, removed the "IMG tags found" field from the toolbar: it was redundant, being the same piece of information already present in the "Shown" field.
Image Inspector: show a courtesy message in case of no images found.
Links Inspector, summary page: graph caption "Links by follow/nofollow" (and all language translations) changed to "Links by follow/nofollow" (with spaces between the /) to make it more readable (especially on Win it looked blurred).
[Mac] Links inspector: Mac has now a consistent behavior with the Windows version when showing a courtesy message in case of no links found matching the current extraction criteria.
[Win] Community Edition: crawl option "Maximum number of pages/images" numeric up/down control had a default increment (when clicking on the up/down buttons) of 500, making it very little usable (one had to type in the desired number to obtain it. Now default increment is 10.
[Mac] Community Edition: crawl option "Maximum number of pages/images" numeric up/down control had a default increment (when clicking on the up/down buttons) of 1. Now default increment is 10.
[Mac] Professional Edition and ProTrial Edition: crawl option "Maximum number of pages/images" numeric up/down control had a default increment (when clicking on the up/down buttons) of 1, making it very little usable (one had to type in the desired number to obtain it. Now default increment is 500.
Crawl options: default maximum download size is now 512 KB (it previously was 200 KB).
Keep in mind that the average HTML weight is less than 30 KB (according to HTTP archive https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight#bytesHtml ) and rarely exceeds 100 KB, but when it does, it really exceeds the average so much that we increasingly had request for assistance because the spider truncated the page and users did not understand it.
Truncation is a good thing, but user has to notice it, so we added UI clues to point it out.
Nevertheless, we also wanted to reduce the times truncation actually occurs so that if HTML page weight is not too much user could prioritize other things.
Performance analysis still is to be done, and Visual SEO Studio is a powerful tool for that.
Minimum and maximum possible sizes also slightly changed along with default increment to respect powers of two.
Tabular Form: in case of page truncation (due to the page size exceeding the maximum download size), the "Truncated" column is now represented with an icon that better meets users' expectations (a red circled exclamation mark instead of a light-gray cross).
Readability Analysis: when exporting the data to Excel, cell colors are now exported too.
[Mac] Readability Analysis: grid now hidden when it is initially empty to ease clicking on the C2A link. The grid is now also hidden whenever a new analysis is in progress.
All "Site Analysis" reports and tools: layout made consistent in terms of controls padding and width.
Various "Site Analysis" reports and tools: layout made lighter, removing unnecessary borders.
Histogram graphs: vertical labels text drawn from top to bottom (i.e. rotated 90 degrees clockwise).
On average it makes it more understandable in the rare cases when the text length exceeds the graph area.
Histogram graphs: for flat 2D bars do not use gradients but solid colors with no black outline for a lighter UI.
Histogram graphs: axis lines are now drawn lighter than the labels for a better UX.
Histogram graphs: ensure that vertical labels within the drawing area are always written.
[Mac] Histogram graphs: for better visibility of histograms use anti-aliasing only for texts and cylinders, not for XY axises, marks and rectangles.
[Mac] Histogram graphs: use mouse up event to pop up the context menu (consistent to Mac usability).
Pie charts: in case of empty pies draw at least border and title.
[Language IT] Some sentences reworded using less verbose expressions, more immediate to grasp.
Performances:
Links Inspector: switching filter is now extremely faster.
Program startup now slightly faster on average.
Images Inspector: switching filter is now extremely faster.
[Win] Sorting columns on any grid is now 100% faster.
[Win] Overall program UI (and other parts) performance slightly improved, better leveraging accelerations offered by the underlying OS version for Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Various:
The following features are now also available in the Community Edition (with of course the limitation that only up to 500 pages can be analyzed since that is that Community Edition crawl limit):
URL suggestions, Images Inspector, Links Inspector, Performance suggestions, hreflang Analysis, Readability, Data Extraction and Custom Filters.
Readability tool command moved higher in Command Pad, and in Session Management toolbar and context menu.
Better diagnostics to recognize situations where major OS updates change the Hardware Signature to which a license is bound to.
Fixes:
[Mac] When the Links Inspector was launched on a crawl session already loaded in memory, the "Find Links" button did not get enabled.
Fixed crashing condition during crawling caused by a (wrong) link to what resulted in an incredibly long domain name.
Links Inspector: the "Broken links" filter did not take into account links that led to a 404 or 410 HTTP status AFTER a redirect chain.
Images Inspector: some badly formed image URLs, discarded for safety, could have caused the counts found items differ slightly with the ones shown.
Images Inspector: during processing time the underlying engine was a bit too early saying it reached 100% computation, as afterward it did some (usually very quick) further computation.
We seriously doubt users could have ever noticed.
[Mac] Readability Analysis: using the quick link command instead of the equivalent main call to action button when the grid was empty resulted in a crash.
Histogram graphs: avoided potential crashing condition.
Histogram graphs: Avoided a crashing condition occurring when selecting in zoom mode starting from below the X axis and moving top left.
Histogram graphs: ensures that the histogram context menu matches the diagram type (2D/3D).
[Win] Histogram graphs: avoided a crash condition.
[Win] Histogram graphs: avoided a possible crash condition.
[Win] Histogram graphs: fixed crashing condition occurred when all graph bars had value zero.
[Mac] Histogram graphs: fixed default histogram border color on Mac to have it consistent with the default pie chart border color.
[Mac] Histogram graphs: fixed axis color when exporting histograms in dark mode.
[Mac] Histogram graphs: fixed wrong zooming factor behaviours after a context menu item selection.
[Win] Pie charts: fixed a minor issue, where at the first focus a pie slice was not highlighted if the pie was first overlapped by the progress bar.
[Win] Images Inspector: at the end of the processing the progress bar overlaying the summary page graphs disappeared, but left an "indented corner" on top of the graph in the background.
[Win] Links Inspector: at the end of the processing the progress bar overlaying the summary page graphs disappeared, but left an "indented corner" on top of the graph in the background.
[Mac] Fixed the drawing of a single tab when its width is less than 200px (the issue could also have been potentially a rare corner case crash, even if it never happened to a real user).
[Mac] Avoided a potential crash when reducing the size of a tab control (the issue could also have been potentially a rare corner case crash, even if it never happened to a real user).
[Mac] When activating a Professional (or Pro Trial) edition, the program main title didn't get updated with the new edition name.
Crawl Sitemap: a crawl option label text did not fit the allotted space for Russian language. Now the dialog window has been re-arranged and re-sized.
[Mac] Session window: titles of histograms "Links depth" and "Download time" did not update when switching application language.
Typos fixed (various languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.4.0.11 (Nov 19, 2021)

New Features:
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 ships 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.
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.
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.
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.
Links Inspector: added new column "Redirect loops" to the main table.
It states whether a redirect chain is potentially infinite.
Usability / UX:
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Export to Excel: now rows with multi-line cell values are exported with row height sufficient to show all cell lines.
Export to Excel: now cell content is vertically aligned, as it displays better in case of multi-line cell values.
[Mac] Export to Excel: now header rows of the exported spreadsheet have enough height to display wrapped header text.
[Mac] Added dark mode support for pie and histogram charts.
[Mac] darkened unselected header tabs in order to better identify the selected one.
[Mac] In all grids: cell content can now be copied, or viewed in a separate dialog, by using the context menu.
Performances:
Links Inspector, main table: Sped-up sorting of "Destination status" column.
Fixes:
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.
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.
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.
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).
[Mac] Grid cells did not provide a way to show content of cells spanning over their size; now they display it in a tooltip.
[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.
[Mac] Since miniatures are not available on Mac, miniature options are now not shown in preferences dialog.
Page Images tool, fixed crash condition (occurred to three real users).

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.3.4.10 (Nov 18, 2021)

New Features:
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 ships 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.
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.
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.
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.
Links Inspector: added new column "Redirect loops" to the main table.
It states whether a redirect chain is potentially infinite.
Usability / UX:
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Export to Excel: now rows with multi-line cell values are exported with row height sufficient to show all cell lines.
Export to Excel: now cell content is vertically aligned, as it displays better in case of multi-line cell values.
[Mac] Export to Excel: now header rows of the exported spreadsheet have enough height to display wrapped header text.
[Mac] Added dark mode support for pie and histogram charts.
[Mac] darkened unselected header tabs in order to better identify the selected one.
[Mac] In all grids: cell content can now be copied, or viewed in a separate dialog, by using the context menu.
Performances:
Links Inspector, main table: Sped-up sorting of "Destination status" column.
Fixes:
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.
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.
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.
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).
[Mac] Grid cells did not provide a way to show content of cells spanning over their size; now they display it in a tooltip.
[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.
[Mac] Since miniatures are not available on Mac, miniature options are now not shown in preferences dialog.
Page Images tool, fixed crash condition (occurred to three real users).

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.3.3.9 (Jul 23, 2021)

Usability / UX:
Histogram charts: added 3D cylindrical bars view (used by default).
User can switch between 2D and 3D view by using the context menu.
[Mac] Data Extraction: UI no longer using a split panel permitting to resize the upper portion.
Now the behavior has been aligned to the one of the Windows version.
[Mac] Adjusted "Find in grid" dialog size on BigSur.
[Mac] Fixed height of grid break down in HTML Suggestions and URL suggestions to avoid scrolling.
Various:
Crawling: maximum number of redirects to follow is now 10.
Maximum value was previously 5 to mimic googlebot behavior, but recently Google updated a document https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/http-network-errors stating that it can follow up to 10 hops (but doesn't specify too much, stating it might depend on the specific bot).
We left 5 as default value to comply with RFC 1945, plus we want our spider to be more restrictive in order to give users a way to understand a potential problem, since 10 is really a lot and it's not clear when googlebot flavors will actually follow up to such a value.
GA Suggestions, and Scripts processing in general: now the tools also accepts type="javascript/blocked" as a valid mime type for scripts, even if it is not:
it's an arbitrary value commonly used to block third party scripts (and cookies) upon acceptance of terms by the user, then another script changes their mime type to a proper one in order to let the browser execute them.
The tool does not guarantee though that a script will change the mime type with a correct one.
We decided to use this strategy because it prevents users focusing on false issues.
If another technical problem would prevent the script to change the mime type of the blocked ones, user should investigate that case, not - say - a GA setting issue.
[Win] Improved diagnostics in case of crashes.
Fixes:
[Mac] HTML/URL suggestions (and potentially other reports with "suggestion trees"):
fixed a crashing issue that could have occasionally occurred when the tree nodes exceeded a certain amount so that a dummy node is shown instead.
[Mac] Minor fix in system diagnostics.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.3.2.1 (Mar 5, 2021)

Usability / UX:
[Mac] "Crawl sitemap": adjusted height of dialog windows as the OK/Cancel button were partially hidden.
[Mac] "Crawl multiple sites": adjusted height of dialog windows as the OK/Cancel button were partially hidden.
[Mac] Images Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, pie charts and labels spaces as in the Windows version.
[Mac] Links Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, pie charts and labels spaces as in the Windows version.
Various:
[Mac] Licensing: use the computer name instead of the bonjour name to generate the hardware signature to which licenses are bound.
The previous approach had a drawback because occasionally the system changed the computer share name to resolve potential conflicts, invalidating the product license.
The down side is that some macOS paid licenses will be invalidated, and users will have to re-insert their activation code (we will contact them).
Fixes:
Fixed crashing condition occurring on some machines when trying to display histogram data with extremely thin bars.
[Mac] Data Extraction, fixed crashing regression that occurred when launching the feature.
Crawling, external images where explored when the options "Crawl external links" and "Crawl images" were selected, but their content was not downloaded.
Export to Excel: fixed bug that in some cases caused columns of type DateTime and TimeSpan non being formatted correctly.
[Mac] Crawl options: Mac version didn't permit specifying a max crawl depth of zero (i.e. crawl the Home Page only).
Of course one could have always set the maximum number of pages to 1 and get the same result.
[Mac] Fixed a regression in the Image Optimizer, where for some image formats the preview was all blank or all black.
Images Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the label text of the counter field above the tree view was not correctly updated with the right translations.
Images Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the label text of the counter field above the tree view was not correctly updated with the right translations.
On language change, histogram titles did not get updated with the new language text.
On language change, the main window title did not get updated with the new language text.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.3.1.3 (Jan 28, 2021)

New Features:
Links Inspector: now the two-level tree views content can be exported to Excel/CSV.
Images Inspector: now the two-level tree views content can be exported to Excel/CSV.
HTML Suggestions: now the two-level tree views content can be exported to Excel/CSV.
URL Suggestions: now the two-level tree views content can be exported to Excel/CSV.
Usability / UX:
Links Inspector: now the two-level tree views permit via context menu entry to copy the value of the 1st level node.
Links Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, the first column header (master/slave column) now clearly states also the meaning of the slave value, using the form "master / slave".
[Mac] Links Inspector: now the two-level tree views open with first node expanded (like in the Windows version).
Image Inspector: now the two-level tree views permit via context menu entry to copy the value of the 1st level node.
[Mac] Image Inspector: now the two-level tree views open with first node expanded (like in the Windows version).
[Win] Image Inspector: now in the two-level tree views, column headers and cell values share the same alignment.
HTML Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, the first column header (master/slave column) now clearly states also the meaning of the slave value, using the form "master / slave".
HTML Suggestions: now the two-level tree views permit via context menu entry to copy the value of the 1st level node.
URL Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, the first column header (master/slave column) now clearly states also the meaning of the slave value, using the form "master / slave".
URL Suggestions: now the two-level tree views permit via context menu entry to copy the value of the 1st level node.
When exporting grids to Excel, the program now also exports images (e.g. found in several summary tabs, showing mini percentage pie charts).
Bing Webmaster Tools integration: when trying to add BWT data in a grid without having provided a Bing API key, the message box used was title as "Error", but the icon was not matching (especially in the Mac version).
Now the title is "Warning", as it is something the user can fix by adding an API key.
Performance:
[Win] Images Inspector: when the number of first level nodes in the tree views are huge (> 10.000) rendering and rendering are quicker.
Fixes:
[Mac] Google Search Console accounts: on macOS 11.1 Big Sur clicking on the link "Get Google Authorization Code" does not produce any visible result.
Google Search Console accounts, regression fixed. After a change in Google APIs retrieving an account Full Name did not work any longer.
The effect was that the program showed the email address as a fall back instead of the previous text composed by the email and the user's full name.
[Mac] Links Inspector: fixed crash that occurred by expanding a 1st level node in the two-level tree views, and scrolling to visualize up to 10.000 sub nodes.
Links Inspector: performing a second search after the first one did not load correctly the tabs with the 2-level tree views.
Links Inspector: loading data with a subsequent search did not expand the first node of the 2-level tree views.
[Win] Links Inspector: fixed minor UI issue.
[Mac] Links Inspector, tab "Link list" main table: right clicking when the table was empty or when no row was selected (e.g. right clicking on the column header) did not pop up the context menu item containing the generic (not specific to a single row) menu items.
Links Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the header of the first column (master/slave) was not correctly updated with the right translations.
[Win] Image Inspector: fixed a UI issue in the two-level tree views, where the vertical scrollbar - when present - was partially hidden making it hard to use it.
[Win] Images Inspector: prevented theoretical rare corner case threading crash when loading the two-level tree views.
Images Inspector: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the header of the first column (master/slave) was not correctly updated with the right translations.
HTML Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the header of the first column (master/slave) was not correctly updated with the right translations.
HTML Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the label of the instance counter field above the tree view was not correctly updated with the right translations.
HTML Suggestions: in the tables sporting a counter column, at the change of the language the header name of the column was not correctly updated with the right translations.
URL Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the header of the first column (master/slave) was not correctly updated with the right translations.
URL Suggestions: in the 2-level tree views, at the change of the language the label of the instance counter field above the tree view was not correctly updated with the right translations.
URL Suggestions: in the tables sporting a counter column, at the change of the language the header name of the column was not correctly updated with the right translations.
Performance Suggestions: in the tables sporting a counter column, at the change of the language the header name of the column was not correctly updated with the right translations.
Export to CSV: prevented potential crashing condition (never occurred in real world).
Export to Excel: use the correct number formatting.
Verified Sites table, export to Excel: column "Verified" was not centered when exported.
Custom Filters: querable property "HTTP Status Code" was wrongly categorized under "Various" instead of "HTTP".

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.3.0.3 (Dec 18, 2020)

New Features:
GA Suggestions engine extended to distinguish Global Sites Tag vs old analytics.js (two versions) and legacy ga.js
GA Suggestions: added "gtag.js code (Global Site Tag)" tab report, listing all pages using the now recommended manual setup method for Analytics (other than GTM).
GA Suggestions: added "Old (2012) analytics.js code" tab report, listing all pages using old Universal Analytics setup code.
GA Suggestions: added "Old (2009) ga.js code" tab report, listing all pages using old Classic Analytics ga.js asynchronous setup code script (2009).
GA Suggestions: added "Without GTM code" tab report, listing all pages where Google Tag Manager setup is not detected.
GA Suggestions: added "With GTM code" tab report, listing all pages where Google Tag Manager setup is detected.
GA Suggestions: added "With GA code" tab report, listing all pages where any manual Google Analytics setup is detected, regardless of it being the latest recommended Global Site Tag (gtag.js) or an older version of the tracking code.
Usability / UX:
Help window now has a "Read online documentation" link that will open the very same content shown on a web page. This way users speaking languages different from English and Italian will be able if they wish to see the help page content translated in their preferred language using the integrated browser translator.
Start-up: the very first time the program is launched, instead of asking for a project name now the default one is used.
GA Suggestions: report "Containing Synch script" renamed as "Old (2007) ga.js code (synchronous script)" (all languages) for better clarity. Contextual Help content updated accordingly.
GA Suggestions: report "Containing Urchin code" renamed as "Old (2005) urchin.js code" (all languages) for better clarity. Contextual Help content updated accordingly.
GA Suggestions: tab "Missing GA code" renamed as "Without GA code" (English only) to better align to program conventions.
GA Suggestions: now bottom panes start collapsed (like the right panes) to better let user spot content of summary tab on targeted lower screen resolutions (especially on Mac systems).
URL Suggestions: report "Missing Canonical tag" renamed as "Without canonical tag" (all languages) for better clarity. Contextual Help content updated accordingly.
GA Suggestions, layout revisited to better fit all new reports.
HTML Suggestions: improved layout (tab control left and right borders spaced equally from the outer container).
[Win] GA Suggestions: improved layout (tab control left and right borders spaced equally from the outer container).
[Win] hreflang Analysis: improved layout, controls aligned like in other reports.
[Win] URL Suggestions: improved layout (tab control left and right borders spaced equally from the outer container).
Performances:
[Mac] Crawling: SVG image pixel size extracted much more quickly and with much less memory and CPU footprint.
Various:
Updated Magick.NET graphic librar to latest release.
[Win] Now using the new Sectigo (formerly Comodo) code signing certificate, since the old one was going to expire.
Fixes:
Custom Filters: fixed potential crashing condition (occurred to only one user so far) which could have occurred for some uncommon operators.
When SVG definition started with a comment they were not recognized as SVG images.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.2.1.3 (Aug 11, 2020)

New Features:
Support to SVG images.
SVG images are now recognized and processed like other image formats. SVG images taken into account are those inserted using a IMG tag.
Visual SEO Studio reports pixel image sizes for SVG images when provided within the image XML declaration; keep in mind that being SVG images scalable vector images, they do not degrade in quality when resized.
On Windows, rendering is performed with Magick.NET which uses an internal engine, or with Inkscape engine if installed and found in system path.
On macOS the program recognizes the format, downloads the files, and extracts their pixel size, but rendering is temporarily disabled. For a particular category of images we have detected some stability bugs in the open source libraries we are using; we thus decided to pospone the ability to render SVG files on Mac. Like with other open source libraries we use, we report detected bugs and, if possible, provide patches and fixes.
Each library has different support to SVG specifications, so some more advanced features might not be rendered depending on the used images. For the most part, being SVG images mostly used on the Web for logos and simple images, we have found no big differences in the quality of the rendered images.
Usability / UX:
Images Inspector, in case of data URI images (i.e. embedded images) the SRC/URL truncation now leaves a longer part of the URL to display.
[Mac] Improved dark mode visibility of "Options" panels in the "Crawl Sitemap", "Craw URL List" and "Crawl Multiple Sites" dialog windows.
Fixes:
Crawling: Start URL was not normalized, causing a crash in case of path starting with a redundant // when trying to follow path-less relative URLs.
Fixed corner-case crashing condition occurred to a single user upon updating a project.
[Win] Optimize Image window: fixed crashing condition occasionally occurring when the tool loaded. Thanks to Gabriel S. for reporting the issue with detailed instructions on how to reproduce it.
Crawling: HTTP Authentication (advanced parameter) was not passed for XML Sitemaps in some cases.
Crawling: HTTP Authentication (advanced parameter) was not passed for image resources.
Images Inspector, tab "Distinct images": in case of data URI images (i.e. embedded images) the URL is shown truncated (note that in case of data URIs too long no URL was displayed).
Images Inspector, tab "Distinct images": in case of data URI images (i.e. embedded images) the Content right panel did not show the image.
Workaround to permit users affected (actually only one has ever been detected) by a bug fixed in 2.2 (corner-case issue where a latency delay in saving the initial crawl session record caused all reports that needed to bulk inspect the pages HTML content to discard the first few crawled pages) to actually be able bulk inspecting without error also crawl sessions saved before the fix was done.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.2.0.6 (Jun 11, 2020)

New Features:
Image optimization tool.
Images are often the heavy loads preventing to achieve the desired performances. Visual SEO Studio provides now a powerful tool to optimize image size directly within the program.
The "Optimize Image" tool permits to save a lighter version of the image by permitting you to reduce pixel dimensions, image format and quality level, and permits you to visually check the result image to see if maintains an acceptable perceived quality.
Supported formats for the original image are all those currently supported by the SEO spider:
BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG and WebP.
The "Optimize Image" tool can be invoked from Images Inspector via new context menu item "Optimize image..." available in tab "IMG tag list" main grid, in tab "Distinct images" grid, and in all tree image views.
Full support for WebP image format (previously it was crawled and stored, but the viewer was not able to show WebP images).
WebP images crawled and stored with Visual SEO Studio versions from 1.9.8 to 2.1.1 can now be displayed and their pixel size recognized, but some reports will not show their pixel size because that should have been ispected at crawl time. New crawl sessions will of course not have problems and pixel size of WebP images will appear on all reports handling them.
Note: in the Mac version the WebP format only supported on systems with macOS 10.14 or newer, otherwise the program will did as before: crawl WebP images, read their byte size, store them locally, but will be unable to read their pixel size and to display them.
New crawl option: "Crawl external links", enabled by default.
The option is available for normal crawl sessions started using the "Crawl a site..." command.
Tells whether the spider should also visit external URLs found in internal links.
Only the linked external pages will be visited, the spider will not go deeper. The main purpose of the option is enabling you to find broken external links.
Redirected URLs will be followed. External pages will not be taken into account in most analysis reports (Custom Filters is the exception).
Usability / UX:
Create Sitemap window: when user attempted to export an empty Sitemap, the shown message box used to have an Information caption and icon; now it uses a Warning caption and icon.
Various:
Right-side "Content" panel: now in case of image resource, it also shows the image type in the bottom fields. It also works for embedded "Data URI" images.
Crawl URL List: now if an URL is an image, other than visited the image content is also stored.
Performance Suggestions: robots.txt pages are now skipped from inspection.
Crawling, increased number of common image extension recognized.
Images Inspector, tab "Distinct images": added "Content Type" column.
Images Inspector, main grid: added "Content Type" column.
Images Inspector: new context menu item "Optimize image..." in tab "IMG tag list" main grid.
Image Inspector, new context menu item "Optimize image..." in tab "Distinct images" grid.
Image Inspector, new context menu item "Optimize image..." in tree image views.
Uniformed some translations across different parts of the program.
Added nQuant, Magick.NET and ImageMagick to credits document.
Fixes:
Crawling: fixed a corner-case issue (detected in only a single real-world instance) a latency delay in saving the initial crawl session record caused all reports that needed to bulk inspect the pages HTML content to discard the first few crawled pages. Thanks to M.M. for reporting the case and sharing with us the project database.
Links Inspector / Page Links: fixed a fake positive detection as "Sidebar" link type, caused by a CSS "no-sidebar" class found during DOM traversal.
Typos fixed (various languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.1.1.0 (Apr 26, 2020)

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.1.0.8 (Apr 25, 2020)

New Features:
Integrated online help.
The program now has an integrated help which constantly shows documentation for the active controls. Every single UI element is documented and explained, you can highlight its documentation by clicking on the specific control (labels, text boxes, grid cells...).
The first time you will launch the new version of the program you will be asked if you want the independent help window to always open with it.
A new panel in Preferences/Options permits you to change the setting, and choose a style for the help pages.
Usability / UX:
Links Inspector: hidden column "Destination is Index" showed for "false" value the nofollow icon; now changed with the red X icon.
Main views (Crawl view, Folder view and Tabular view) and "Create XML Sitemap" main window: uniformed casing of upper labels.
GA Suggestions: table label "Codes found:" rewritten as "Tracking IDs found:" to avoid confusion with the term "code", previously used both to indicate the "javascript source code" and the "tracking ID code".
URL Suggestions, reports "Duplicate Canonical tags" and "Duplicate Canonical tags (case insensitive)" (canonicalized pages grouped by canonical URL) were set as issues of type "Warning", but they actually were "Information".
URL Suggestions, report "Canonical not matching URL" (list of canonicalized pages) was set as issue of type "Warning", but it actually just an "Information".
GA Suggestions: issue type of report "Missing GA code" changed from Error to Warning for clarity sake, because - supposing the web analytics system of reference is GA - when no GA code is detected, you have to see if GTM code is detected instead (with report "No GA and no GTM code"), and if it is installed check manually on GTM dashboard if GA installation is configured.
GA Suggestions: issue type of report "No GA and no GTM code" changed from Warning to Error, because - supposing the web analytics system of reference is GA - we are in a sure case of error.
Search Results grid: mandatory columns (i.e. columns that cannot be hidden) changed with a minimal set that made more sense.
"Find Result" bottom panel: ensured that the mandatory columns are not initially hidden.
"Google Search Console Authorization" window: adjusted code request dialog layout.
Start Page, changed icon with a house icon to make it cleared its centrality.
[Win] Main menu, added some icons.
[Win] Take screenshot from URL, removed maximize/minimize buttons in "Insert URL" dialog window.
[Win] Links Inspector tab: uniformed external padding to the other document tabs.
[Win] Images Inspector tab: uniformed external padding to the other document tabs.
[Win] Start Page: upper links equally spaces for all languages.
Added new Command Pad panel with the content of main menu File item (with the exceptions of the Exit command removed and an additions View Help added).
Menu Item "Manage Sessions" moved from under main menu entry "Crawl" to under menu entry "File".
Major revision of all texts within the program to make them clearer and uniform used notations (various languages):
UI: "SERP snippet emulator" renamed as "SERP preview" (all languages).
Start Page, link "Start new project..." re-worded as "Create new project..." (EN language).
Command "Pick columns" renamed as "Choose columns" (EN language only).
Uniformed notation for "Downlowd time" and "Download date" across the program (various languages).
Custom Filters: button "Edit current" (tooltip) rephrased in Italian translation.
Create sitemap window and Export to sitemap panel, option "Use Canonical path if exists" simplified to "Use Canonical path" (EN language only, other language translations were already more compact).
Crawl URL List window: tab "URLs" renamed as "URL list" for better clarity (EN language).
Options, Performance suggestions panel: two options texts slightly changed (EN language).
View Stored robots.txt: uniformed label notations.
View Stored robots.txt: some translations slightly fixed with plurals.
Links Inspector, tooltip fixed (EN language).
Context menus, uniformed notations (all languages).
Crawl summary visual graphs, letter upper-cased to uniform notation with other tabs (EN language).
Create XML Sitemap: column Authority localized (IT language).
Session right panel, uniformed session name label with main view text (FR language).
Session right panel, uniformed label casing.
Start page / Manage Sessions / Session side panel: uniformed text notations for some grid column headers (various languages).
Start page: uniformed text notations for some grid column headers (various languages).
Manage Sessions form: uniformed text notations for context menu entries and toolbar tooltips (all languages).
Uniformed notation used for various concepts throughout the program (various languages).
Various:
View stored robots.txt - removed useless label.
"Create XML Sitemap" and "Export to XML Sitemap" in Tabular View: option "Add Priority" is now not flagged by default. Google - the most diffused search engine - does not use it, and other search engines we have reason to believe they tend to discard it, so there's not point in bloating by default the XML files.
Create XML Sitemap: removed column Authority (hidden by default), as it provided no added value.
Example URL in "Crawl a Site" and "Crawl Multiple Sites" now sports https:// protocol.
When user invokes a command to open a new tab which is already open, if launched again against the same crawl session, now the program selects the previously opened tab instead of opening a new one.
This happens for tabs that do not need any input parameter to open and thus the result would not change.
Removed old main menu entry "Help" > "Visual SEO Studio on the Web" > "Visual SEO Studio on Google+" (we simply forgot removing it time ago when G+ was dismissed).
About windows, icon changed to a more standard one.
Check For Updates windows, icon changed to a more standard one.
Fixes:
Crawl URL List: fixed crashing condition that could have triggered when crawling a list of URLs if one address pointed to an unexpected file extension.
Crawl XML Sitemap by robots.txt: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred when the robots.txt listed a XML Sitemap outside of its (sub)domain.
Readability Analysis: cell coloration for FRES (and derived formulas) column had color gradient inverted (regression since rel. 1.9.2).
hreflang Viewer: Test 2 "Is the HREF pointing to a visited page? " was evidenced as Warning when failed, now it is evidenced as Error (like the corresponding report in "heflang Analysis").
hreflang Viewer: Test 3 "Is the HREF pointing to a proper HTML page?" was evidenced as Error when failed, now it is evidenced as Warning (just because according to the specs it is technically possible, even if it is almost certainly an error).
hreflang Analysis: issue "hreflang to non-HTML" was evidenced as Error, now it is evidenced as Warning.
Images Inspector: grouped trees, context menus "Copy page URL" and "Browse page URL" were actually copying/browsing the image URL when the Content switch in the upper toolbar was set to "Destination image" (default value) instead of "Source page".
Images Inspector, tree views: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred in some cases when using the "Copy page URL" context menu.
Tabular View: some icon columns were not sortable.
Validation panel: in case of XML Sitemap, when the sitemap was truncated, the size field reported the hard-coded message "> 10 MB" with old protocol size limit of 10 MB (it now is 50 MB).
Validation panel: in case of XML Sitemap, when the sitemap was truncated, the size field reported the a message with the dimension in "MB" not localized (for some languages like French or Russian they use a different symbol).
XML Sitemap validation: fixed error message shown in case an XML Sitemap could not be validated because it were truncated since it exceeded the maximum of 50 MB uncompressed size permitted by the protocol (the error message had hard-coded the old 10 MB limit; notice that that was an error in the message text only, the validator already considered the new size limit).
Downloaded XML Sitemaps were still truncated at the old 10 MB, while now the standard permits up to 50 MB.
Fixed crashing bug occurred to a single user, likely when he closed the current crawl window as soon as the crawl process was terminated (a rare corner case situation).
Non crawled items pane: a couple of grid hidden columns were not selectable as visible. URL column made non hideable.
Sitemap crawling: the XML Sitemap protocol permits sitemap to list URLs within the sitemap (sub-domain); while the program already considered URL of the same domain but different subdomains (to show them as non-crawlable items because outside of the sitemap authority), it skipped URLs from outside domain. Now it considers them too so that user could pinpoint the same "outside of the sitemap authority" issue for them as well.
Crawl XML Sitemap: fixed error in counted pages (the sitemap was erroneously counted).
Fixed various typos and translations (all languages).
[WIN] Options, threshold for HTML Suggestions, URL Suggestions and Performance suggestions: setting a numeric slider to the maximum value, the slider thumb was concealed from the view.
[Win] Language switching: when the current UI language was switched, some toolbar buttons tooltips were not updating the tooltip text with the translation.
[Win] UI: "Page CSS/JS file" bottom panel: columns "SRC value" and "Type" (scripts grid) and "HREF value" and "Type" (CSS files grid) were not read-only.

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.0.2.3 (Jan 17, 2020)

New in Visual SEO Studio 2.0.1.7 (Jan 4, 2020)

New Features:
Tabular View, Crawl View and Folder View: in case of redirected page, right clicking on the page row/node you have two new context menu options: "Go to Redirection URL" (which selects the row/node page of the URL pointed by the Location HTTP header, if available) and "Browse Redirection URL".
Usability / UX:
Uniformed notation for "Start URL" text (all languages).
Changed translation for "Start page" (IT only).
[Win] Options: adjusted all options forms to give them a consistent layout.
[Mac] Options: Google API credentials, position of delete popup message is now screen centered.
Performances:
Crawling: reduced pressure on crawl queue in case of multi-threaded crawl, avoiding cases where some URLs were queued more than once only to be discarded afterward.
[Win] SQLite updated to the latest release (stabler and more performant).
[Mac] Avoid unnecessary paintings of the tab control.
Various:
[Mac] Crawl session panel: in case of URL list, the Start URL field was shown empty, while in the Win version it showed the "(URL list)" text.
Now it has been aligned to the Windows version behaviour.
Fixes:
When used for verifying web sites, GSC authentication did not complete due to changes on Google implementations.
Function "Find in page" did skip all non-crawled pages. While this did make sense in most cases (searching for title, description, in-text and in-html), one could have desired to search also non-crawled URLs using a part of the URL. It is now possible.
Crawling: some URLs could have been crawled more than once when discovered by concurrent threads nearly at the same time if they were discovered via HTTP redirection.
Crawling: due to some corner-case concurrency issues some non-crawled items were occasionally stored more than once (and showed up in Tabular View).
Crawling: some URLs could have been crawled more than once when discovered by concurrent threads nearly at the same time.
Crawling, workaround: some silly ASP.NET sites added a 302 redirection to /robots.txt?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 in order to test for cookies support and generate session id querystring url parameters instead, thus preventing exploration (unless one had verified the site and could ask to ignore robots.txt).
Now we treat a redirection to the very same robots.txt with any querystring parameter as we do with the option "For robots.txt file, treat a redirection to [other domain]/robots.txt as 'full allow'" (which is selected by default).
Note that we are ignoring the robots.txt here, but we are somehow doing it with a rationale that the server is anyway doing something out of the robots exclusion standard.
Verified Sites: GSC verification did not add properties verified with domain verification. Now it adds all four possible properties (with/without www., and http/https, combined).
URLs linked from A tags that looked like normal pages, but were redirected to other resources (e.g. images) were not treated as such.
This rare corner-case led to unpleasant side effect, e.g. in Performance Suggestions they were treated as html pages with no scripts, braking for example histograms data, etc...).
[Win] Page Links bottom pane had a - hidden by default - unused "Symbol" column, now removed.
[Mac] Fixed minor UI glitches: when hiding the tab control headers (like in the Command Pad) also hide the tab scrollers.
[Mac] Avoid potential crashes (never occurred to real users) when painting the UI.
[Mac] Setup: minimum macOS version 10.9 enforced (it wrongly asked 10.7 as mimimum).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.9.9 (Aug 13, 2019)

The XML Sitemap generator can now optionally include images (using Google's extension to the protocol, "Image sitemaps").
In order to filter out irrelevant images used only to format pages, two ways are provided:
Skipping images with empty or missing ALT attribute (which according to HTML specifications should be left empty for irrelevant images).
This is by far the fastest soluzion.
Using a reference count (since ALT attribute is often not populated for relevant images, the criteria is setting a maximum number of occurences to discriminate relevant images, and if it is exceeded, the image is considered irrelevant).
In case of large sites this can be significantly slower.
The sitemap generation is performed anyway asynchrounously in order not to freeze the UI, and can be cancelled.
Images sitemaps also work from Tabular, Export to sitemap. The layout of UI options has been reviewed.
Crawl images: the spider now crawls also images linked with A tags (other than the ones linked via IMG tag).
XML Sitemaps generation: now also images linked via the A tag are added to the sitemap; if they have a TITLE attribute, that is used too.
Crawl URL List now supports also image URLs (content not stored).
Images Inspector: tab "Distinct images" now also lists images not linked by IMG tags (but linked by A tags).
Added "Restore" context menu item to 3D pie charts, to restore the pie to its initial zoom and rotation.
Now when entering an activation code (aka license serial number) in case of error user gets a meaningful error message to help them understanding the error cause of the actual error.
Output window colorized.
Moved the craw status indicator from the top right corner of the tree view to the top of the crawl document page.
Crawl summary in Output window: now error messages and things to be noted are colorized to make them easier to spot.
Create Sitemap window: textbox with selected pages now read-only.
Create Sitemap options: simplified option wording ("Use canonical path" instead of "Use canonical path if exists").
Create Sitemap window: the "Export XML Sitemap..." button did not have the right shade of colour.
Output window responsiveness slightly improved.
Fixes:
Fixed condition that in some OS versions made the program crash (extreme case) or more commonly the program ignore an URL which contained square bracket characters.
The problem was detected in "hreflang Analysis", but could theoretically have occurred also elsewhere.
Images Inspector: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred when examining a crawl session containing some images resources crawled not because pointed by an IMG tag but for other reason (e.g. image item in "Crawl URL List").
Fixed condition that in some OS versions made the program crash (extreme case) or more commonly made the program ignore an URL which contained square bracket characters.
Tabular View, export to XML Sitemap: exported sitemap tolerated pages with canonical links differing only in casing from the crawled URL.
This was done to work around some IIS sites with wrong internal linking, but we feel it was a mistake and one should fix internal links (and the rest) before generating a sitemap.
[Win] Create Sitemap options, an option label did not fit the allotted space when language set to Russian.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.8.11 (Jun 14, 2019)

New Features:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Pie charts labels are now much better organized: they never overlap and are connected to their own slice with a dashed line.
CVS Import window: made resizable (Mac) and minimal size set (Win).
Crawl Options: improved layout.
Crawl URL List window is now resizable to better visualize large lists.
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).
Exception box - (also made the send report button more visible)
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).
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
Links Inspector: localized chart label for value "Unknown" (all languages but English).
Links Inspector: localized tree node name for value "Unknown" (all languages but English).
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.
Performance Suggestions: tab listing metacharsets non-UTF-8 now shows also page titles.
Crawl View, Folder View and Tabular View: disabled links-related context menu items for items which are not web pages.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
HTML/Sitemap Validator: size does not show a decimal place when expressed in bytes.
HTML/Sitemap Validator: size symbols now localized.
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.
Uniformed everywhere used notation for "bytes" (all languages).
"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).
Find in Grid icon changed to avoid confusion with the Find in Pages feature.
Session Picker, reduced number of columns.
Multi Crawl window: layout of controls within the options panel (collapsed by default) rearranged to better fit all translations.
[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.
[Mac] Grid Columns Picker window is now resizable (handy when the grid has many columns).
[Mac] Support of Alt/Command+Q shortcut to quit the application.
[Mac] Crawl Options: improved UI layout.
[Mac] Crawl Options: resized numeric up-down controls to better fit their value.
[Mac] Crawl URL List window: improved layout.
[Mac] Crawl URL List window: improved usability when visualizing options pane.
[Mac] Find in grid window: set the focus on the textbox when the window pops up.
[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.
[Mac] HTML/URL/GA/Performance Suggestions and similare reports: added some left padding to the summary links column.
[Mac] Uniformed in dialog windows border thickness for all sides.
[Mac] Links Inspector, minor UI adjustment.
[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.
[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.
[Mac] Links Inspector: toolbars textboxes text-centered when it made sense (aligned to the Windows version).
[Mac] Links Inspector main grid, HREF column left-aligned.
[Mac] Minor UI adjustment in "Crawl a site" window: put some distance between TextBox(es) and between CheckBox(es)
[Mac] Minor UI improvement in the stoppable progress bar.
[Mac] Session Picker window made resizable (as in Windows version).
[Mac] Simplified the right-hand "Crawl Session" pane and made sure that the options fit all the available space.
[Mac] Start Page, recent projects grid: minor UI adjustments.
[Mac] Start Page, recent projects grid: reviewed layout to fit vertical scroll bar; fixed name column alignment to left.
[Mac] Tabular View: now fields that can span multiple lines (e.g. title, description, h1) are vertically aligned to the top.
[Mac] Tabular View: in case of filtered data, related controls in the upper-left toolbar appear better disposed, like in the Windows version.
[Mac] Verified Sites list: fixed column alignments (now they are like in the Windows version).
[Mac] Better date fields formatting.
[Mac] Several text boxed right centered (as they are in the Windows version).
[Mac] Tree views, selected items text color is now white to contrast with the blue background.
[Mac] Improved layout of the "Unexpected Error" window.
Performances:
Speed up improvements - under specific conditions - during the analysis phase of several reports (e.g. Custom Filters, URL Suggestions...).
Writing to the Output window is now more efficient, preventing the UI to freeze when in extreme conditions.
[Win] Tabular View: scrolling data is slightly smoother on old hardware.
[Mac] improved UI responsiveness when closing program tab sheets.
Various:
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.
Uniformed casing notation in translations.
Crawl Limit Reached window now uses the expression "500 pages/images".
[Win] All reports: finer estimation of required memory size necessary to perform computation.
Fixes:
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).
Report could have crashed the program when meeting URLs with path starting with a double slash.
Readability Analysis: stopping elaboration took long before taking effect.
Fixed crashing condition that could have occurred (data dependent) when drawing some histograms with very large number of elements in a reduced client area.
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).
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.
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".
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".
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".
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.
Tabular View: when exported to Excel or CSV, for non-crawled items "Status" column did show a bogus negative number.
Crawl parameters summary: parameter name corrected and made clearer.
Crawl Progress windows: Changed text from "Max Requests Nr.:" to "Max pages/images Nr." since that's the actual value reported.
Crawl Multiple Sites window: Changed text from "Maximum number of URLs:" to "Maximum number of pages/images:" since that's the actual value reported.
Various fixes in translations (all languages).
[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.
[Win] Data Extraction, closing the tab with an unsaved extraction expression having changed the default "extract what" field produced a crash.
[Mac] Data Extraction, load expression dialog window: fixed layout.
[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.
[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.
[Mac] Crawl phase: removed causes of delays, freezes and potential hangs, and provided a much more responsive UI.
[Mac] "* Suggestions" reports: in the tree views used the same icon of the winforms version (an empty document) for leaf nodes.
[Mac] Links Inspector: prevented a crash when choosing the columns to show in the link list table.
[Mac] Links Inspector, tab "Link list", toolbar button "Pick columns" did not have any effect.
[Mac] Links Inspector: changing language did not update graphs.
[Mac] Links Inspector: Main link list, changing the filtering option did not have any filtering effect.
[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.
[Mac] Links Inspector: prevented selecting other tabs while data is loading/processing.
[Mac] Links Inspector main grid columns were not sortable.
[Mac] Crawl Options, max download size (in KB) was 500; aligned to the Windows version (2000 KB).
[Mac] Craw View / Folder View - Regression: fixed a crash that could have occurred when trying to display a little used icon.
[Mac] Crawl phase: do not wrap texts in Output window.
[Mac] DOM Viewer, all attributes had as name the element name instead of the actual attribute name.
[Mac] Find in grid window: scroll to the row containing the found element if not visible.
[Mac] Fixed a crashing condition occasionally occurring when launching HTML and URL Suggestions.
[Mac] HTML Suggestions, tree view nodes for open/closed folder icons were inverted.
[Mac] HTML Suggestions: fixed columns visibility for grids "Pages missing title" and "Pages missing description".
[Mac] Fixed crashing condition occurring when invoking the mouse right-button option "Pick columns..." for some grids.
[Mac] For recoverable errors avoid quitting the application after closing the "Unexpected error" window without sending the report to the crash server.
[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.
[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).
[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.
[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.
[Mac] Non-crawled items panel: clicking on the "robots.txt blocking directive" row link could have highlighted a wrong directive.
[Mac] Right pane "Session" window, made sure that the control at the bottom fits all the available space.
[Mac] Right and bottom panes, "Collapse" arrow icon had tooltip text "Expand" when the pane started collapsed.
[Mac] Right pane "Content" window: fixed crashing condition occasionally occurring when "Show in code" context menu command was invoked with the panel collapsed.
[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.
[Mac] Right pane "Content" window: reduced memory consumption when updating the panel.
[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.
[Mac] Right pane "Content" window: when "Show in code" context menu command was invoked with the panel collapsed, it was not expanded.
[Mac] Right pane "Content" window: switching from one page content to another did not reset scroll vertical position.
[Mac] Fixed crashing condition potentially occurring when processing large data sets.
[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).
[Mac] Progress/Session windows, Link Depth and Download time histogram graphs: Mean and Median values shown at the bottom were not read-only.
[Mac] "hreflang Checker", aligned columns visibility to Windows version.
[Mac] Bottom and right panes layout changed to to match the Windows version layout.
[Mac] Resizing a left or bottom tool when it was collapsed resulted in a weird UI behaviour.
[Mac] Many grid columns were missing the tooltip when it was available in the Windows version.
[Mac] Session Picker columns were not sortable.
[Mac] Session Picker, double-clicking on the columns header caused the selected row to be picked.
[Mac] Start Page, sessions grid: double-clicking on the columns header caused the selected row to be picked.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.7.11 (May 3, 2019)

Usability / UX:
Manage Sessions window: removed redundant columns with (partial) crawl parameters; they were confusing and there is the "Crawl options" list on the side panel for that stuff.
Start page, added "Crawl Type" and (default hidden) "Duration" columns; Manage Session forms: added "Duration" columns.
Uniformed casing notation in translations.
[Win] Start page and Manage Session windows, crawl sessions grids: column headers height auto-resize to fit all language translations.
[Win] Windows setup: legal clause check boxes uniformly to ease their legibility.
Performances:
Loading tabs is now slightly quicker.
Tabular View: minor speedup when loading data.
[Win] Switching language is now slightly faster.
[Mac] Crawling, displaying the text aside the blinking red dot is much faster, making the UI more responsive.
Various:
HTML suggestions and SERP snippet emulator: truncations are now computed according to most recent SERP changes.
Note: you might want to "Restore Defaults" on the HTML settings option in order to use the correct values.
Fixes:
Crawling: in case of fast enough crawl processes, the upper-right dot was not blinking, and the pie chart on the right panel was not updated until the end (regression since 1.9.6).
Tabular View: when loading filtered data (from custom filter or from a suggestion subset) total number of HTTP requests in Session panel was the number of filtered requests; now it shows the complete crawl session count.
Data Extraction: stopping processing only reacted when something matched the selected criteria, otherwise it had no effect. Now it stops immediately.
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.
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)
Fixed crash (regression) occurring occasionally when user closed on a tab when data were still loading from DB. Occurred to one real user (sorry about that).
Minor fixes in texts (kilobyte symbol, still not perfect but people uses it wrongly unfortunately).
Translations fixed, all languages.
[Win] Session list in Start page and Manage Sessions window, grid had the (hidden) "Domain" column not selectable.
[Win] Multi column tree view column headers did not update text at language change.
[Win] Bing integration dialog: corrected dates to match the initial date range selection.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.6.15 (Mar 20, 2019)

New Features:
macOS version available (beta)
Usability / UX:
Tree views (Crawl time, Crawl View and Folder View): Added "Meta Description" column.
Pie charts: avoided that pie labels could lay over the chart.
Crawl Progress site panel: when current crawl-delay applied is not zero, it is evidenced in red.
Crawling UI: now the blinking red dot is at the right of the text, to appear always in the same position regardless of the text aside it.
Tree views (Crawl time, Crawl View and Folder View): in case of multi-line titles, Title column was not easy to read; its cell contents are not vertically aligned to the top.
Application icon revamped, using different layout and sized to better render on the Windows taskbar.
Performances:
Crawling: slightly sped up UI responsiveness on older machines.
Crawl progress panel now more responsive on older machines.
Various:
EPPlus library (used to export to Excel) updated from rel. 3.0 to rel. 4.1.0
Forced .net 4.6.1 as minimum requirement also at application level (other than setup level). If the setup requirements check failed and the program installed anyway (which shouldn't happen), user would be prompted to install .net 4.6.1
File VisualSEO.exe is now smaller, as it is just a launcher; the main program body as been moved to a dedicated dll file. This architecture revamp should not impact normal program behaviour.
Credits: removed MTGCComboBox, added Eto.Forms.
Fixes:
Fixed crashing condition occasionally occurring on slower PCs when quickly scrolling the multi-column combo boxes (used in advanced crawl options to choose HTTP accept/language and user-agent).
Fixed regression (since 1.9.5): when you close the program while still deleting a crawl session, the splash screen should appear and notify while completing the operation before closing.
It didn't show up and the program looked frozen for a short time.
The case is rare as normally crawl session are deleted in no time, but this could happen in case of very large crawl sets.
Fixed regression (since 1.9.5): when you close the program and there still is a pending queue of crawled pages being saved to disk, the splash should appear and update on the number of pending items before closing.
It didn't show up and the program looked frozen.
The case is quite rare as normally items are saved in no time, but this could trigger in case of very large crawls.
Crawling and UI: prevented potentially freezing condition at crawl end.
Worked around a .net framework bug where URLs containing the percent-encoded "%2C" character (i.e. ",") where not recognized as correctly escaped and thus were escaped again by the program, resulting in fake 404 pages.
Crawling: when user stopped crawling beforehand some pages already crawled in the parallel pipeline where not persisted nor shown in the UI; the right panel progress panel showed the correct count of visited pages, but those were then lost.
Data Extraction: when attempting to save an unnamed expression set the focus was wrongly set on the column name instead of the expression set name.
Data Extraction: loading an already existing expression set did not hide the two "No column added so far..." warnings.
Data Extraction: discarding changes from an already saved expression set after having deleted all expressions/columns did not hide the two "No column added so far..." warnings.
Setup file details, corrected copyright year and aligned notice to the one used for the installed files.
Installed files details: corrected copyright year.
Setup file properties: site URL property (visible from Windows "Installed programs") still had the HTTP web address. Updated with the HTTPS version.
Setup: privacy option text updated to correctly reflect GDPR legislation (all languages).
Minor text fixes (all languages).
Missing translations for rare message added (all languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.5.10 (Feb 15, 2019)

This version is a maintenance release. It improves the application user experience and fixes some bugs.
Usability / UX:
Crawling: new "Progress" right panel, shows status of crawl progression, with pretty charts.
Crawling: since we now have a dedicated Crawl Progress side tool, we replaced the upper-left textual overlay status with a less invasive Crawl status notification, visually resembling the VC recording blinking red dot.
"Session" right panel: when a crawl session is loaded from DB, the Crawl Session right pane also shows summary tabs with pretty charts like they are shown in the new "Progress" window at crawl-time.
Pie charts are now 3D, can be rotated and zoomed, fit better the available space... and look much, much better!
Histogram graphs layout revisited. Their text made easier to read regardless the size; context menu options simplified; using a cleaner color scheme better integrated with the application theme.
Histograms - where it makes sense - now give evidence with a different color to the items exceeding the report upper threshold.
Histograms - where it makes sense - now give evidence with a different color to the items exceeding the report lower threshold.
Histogram bottom pane: when no graph is available for the current selection, clear the histogram (instead of keeping the last shown).
Histogram bottom pane: when no histogram is available now shows a courtesy message instead of showing a blank dummy graph, or showing the last histogram shown if ever selected.
HTML suggestions: Now the at first view of the summary tab, the Histogram bottom pane is populated with data (title pixel width).
URL suggestions: Now the at first view of the summary tab, the Histogram bottom pane is populated with data (URL length).
Performance suggestions: Now the at first view of the summary tab, the Histogram bottom pane is populated with data (page size).
Performance suggestions: report "Page size" now uses Kilobytes instead of bytes. The related histogram is thus much less clogged and easier to read. Minor quirk: sorting over the dimension column is approximated to the nearest kB. Yes, "kB" is the correct symbol for Kilobyte, not "KB"!
Plain text viewer has now an upper URL field to explicit the page it refers to, like already done in Content and DOM views.
Crawling: the overlay panel (now sporting a "Crawl in progress" red dot) only overlays the main tree pane.
Crawling: ensured that the summary of a crawl goes at the end in bottom Output pane.
Crawl Session side pane now instead of field "Crawl End" shows the value of "Crawl duration".
Crawl Session side pane: user interface controls position rearranged.
Various:
Setup now requires .net framework 4.6.1 or greater (this also fixes - rare - occasional issues with some SSL/TLS certificates). If .net 4.6.1 is not found the setup will install it. In such case it might take some time.
Setup now requires IE to be 10 or greater - IE is used in embedded mode for OAuth authentication, and to take page screenshots - and the embedded browser if forced to run in IE10 mode. This also fix issues with some users not able to complete site verification using Google authentication with "2-step verification".
Replaced usage of deprecated Google+ API used to get the account name and e-mail address of the OAuth logged in user (to show the user a meaningful name when choosing the account to use for Google Search Console integration).
Fixes:
Fixes rare occasional issues that prevented crawling sites with some old SSL/TLS certificates.
Some users not able to complete site verification using Google authentication with "2-step verification".
Fixed a potentially crashing condition (never actually recorded for real users) that could have occurred then closing a view/report sporting the Crawl Session right panel.
Robots.txt viewer in some cases showed a blank robots.txt content when opened.
Regression fixed: there can be only one instance of Start Page opened.
Page Properties pane, minor improvement in responsiveness.
Create Sitemap: fixed layout issue of Expand/Collapse buttons.
Start page, minor improvement in responsiveness.
Crawling, minor saving in system resources after the crawl has finished or when it has been suspended or stopped.
Verified sites form, GSC credentials: fixed minor UI issue.
Typos fixed (various languages

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.4.3 (Nov 19, 2018)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.3.7 (Oct 17, 2018)

Performance:
Loading huge crawl sessions in Crawl View and - even more - Folder View did take too long and did freeze the UI.
Now the treeviews are rendered progressively and the UI does not freeze.
Load time also went down dramatically: we measured it about 60% faster.
Removed a bottleneck which slowed down storing crawl data on disk in case of large crawls.
Crawl View / Folder View: expand to level is now much faster. For large data sets expanding to a high level can still take long (but to the top level is instantaneous), it depends on data structure (this can be still slow especially for Folder View with huge crawl sessions with highly nested folders).
Links Inspector, link trees now load a little faster.
Progress bars in reports during the data processing phase have less impact on the UI and are less likely to slightly slow it down and temporarily freeze it when performing fast tasks, especially on small crawl sessions (you'll hardly notice the improvement unless you are using an old and slow PC).
Various:
Check for updates: if the window is prompted at program startup because an update is available, the page from where to download the update is opened even if user clicks on the upper-right X.
Crawl View (and run-time crawl view): option "Show crawl progressive" is now not checked by default (as in Folder View).
Crawl progressive number is useful to better understand crawl budget and crawl paths, but it's not the first thing an SEO would look first, thus we made visualization of this piece of information optional
Fixes:
Fixed real world crash that occurred on some versions of Windows, causing the program to crash when launching the Options window.
Bing Webmaster Tools API integrations: fixed crash that occurred when the crawl session was referred to a URL list.
Folder view: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred when loading huge crawl sessions data.
Fixed regression: on some windows (Data Extraction, Custom Filters, hreflang Checker, Screenshots management, robots.txt viewer) progress bar shown when loading or processing data did report visually only up to one tenth of the progress bar width (but reported textual percentage was correct).
Export to Excel and Export to CSV did not export API-added Bing data columns.
Folder View: numeric up-down control "expand to level" had maximum value wrongly computed
Crawling: redirected URLs were queued/crawled/stored each time they were encountered.
This did not impact reports correctness (apart some counters), yet in certain scenarios where the wrong link were in a template (for example) and thus encountered many times, it could have impacted crawl time.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.2.5 (Sep 17, 2018)

New Features:
Bing Webmaster tools API integration:
In grids where it makes sense, user can add columns with search traffic data extracted from Bing webmasters API: Click, Impressions, CTR, Average impression position and Average click position.
The feature is enabled in the Professional Edition and available in the Tabular View (which can show all crawled data, or a subset of it obtained from Custom Filters or any of the Suggestions reports), the list of snippets in Data Extraction, the list of contents in Readability Analysis, or the list of links in Links Inspector.
The command can be invoked from the upper-left context menu (gear icon) present in all grids, and in some cases from easier to spot helper buttons (e.g. grid top right toolbar available in Tabular View and Links Inspector main list).
When no API key has been provided yet, user is first asked to provide one; options form is automatically launched and opened on the new options panel specifically designed to input your Bing Webmaster tools API key, now persisted if configured.
Upon invoking the command, user has to specify the data fetching options: site and date range.
Data is cached in memory to reduce API quota consumption when possible.
Usability / UX:
Grids upper-left context menu: added item group separators now that the number of menu items has grown.
Start page, projects list: renaming a project has a more detailed error message now covering more cases.
New project form: choosing a new project has a more detailed error message now covering more cases.
Main options dialog now loads faster.
Options / URL parameters: notification error icon (which appears in case of validation error) was only partially visible.
Verified sites form: in BWT option, the text label "Bing Webmaster Tools API Key" was too verbose and made the UI clogged. Substituted with "API Key" (all languages).
Performance:
Tree views (Session View and Folder View): switching "Show title / Show path" and "Show crawl progressive" is now a little faster.
Minor improvement in the (already small) impact of progress bars on reported tasks.
Various:
Bing Webmaster Tools api key is now persisted. User can configure it from the Preferences/Options window.
Verified Sites now uses the stored Bing Webmaster Tools API key, if configured.
Verified sites: explanatory text updated.
Verified sites window: better localization for "Bing webmaster tools" notation (all languages).
Google "search analytics" integration: now Google additional data columns (Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Avg. Position) have a "Google: " prefix to better distinguish them from data form other sources (now that we also have Bing equivalent data).
Grids: when present, API integration context menu items are now always enabled. If the Edition does not permit executing the command, user will be prompted a dialog window.
Start page: explanatory text for verified sites updated.
Fixes:
Start page, projects list: renaming a project could have caused a crash in some cases (e.g. some non handled invalid chars, reserved words, existing project name).
Start page, projects list: validation errors were not displayed when user attempted to name a project with an invalid name.
Start page: projects list was acting buggy when sorted over one of the columns.
New project form: creating a new project in some cases could have caused a crash (e.g. some non handled invalid chars, reserved words).
Opening the Preferences/Options window and then clicking OK without having at least loaded the Moz credential pane caused the Moz credentials to be lost.
API integration: adding a first column set (e.g. search analytics columns) and then a second set (e.g. moz metrics) made the first column set non sortable.
Verified sites: Bing API verification did not support proxies.
Check for update: communication errors were recognized, but erroneously reported as "no updates available".
Check for update: timeout errors were not correctly recognized.
GSC "search analytics" settings form: the window could have been shrank to a minimum size that hid the filters options.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.1.3 (Aug 4, 2018)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.9.0.15 (Jul 31, 2018)

New Features:
Mozscape API integration.
Whenever there is a table with with and URL column and it makes sense - Tabular View, Data Extraction, Readability Analysis and Links Inspector - user can choose to add four columns with the most used data from Moz: PA, DA, and two URL links metrics (nr. of Links and nr. of External Equity-Passing Links).
GSC "Search Analytics" API integration:
Now that (since 18 Jun 2018 https://twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1008754160618082304 ) Google API permits it, we added support for fetching up to 16 months of data in Visual SEO Studio as well.
The same pre-arranged date ranges available in the new GSC are available as well.
Usability / UX:
Default colour scheme slightly changed making the light green more pastel-green to make it more eye-resting.
Suggestions reports now use a brand new charting component to draw the pie chart.
The chart now always fit the available space properly so that user can more easily read the slices percentages. User can also rotate the graph in cases the labels were overlapped.
Used in: HTML Suggestions, URL Suggestions, hreflang Analysis and GA Suggestions.
GSC "Search Analytics" options form, minor UI adjustments.
GSC options window: the property combo after being populated, if no entry matches the grid content is left unselected.
Previously it selected by default the first entry, but this occasionally caused confusion.
Settings window has now a gear icon.
Main menu, added gear icon for Settings menu entry.
Settings window: improved order of the tree nodes in the left side pane.
Options dialogs layout uniformed.
Option dialogs have now an upper title (same as the current node text in the left pane tree) to make it clearer what they are about.
Options dialog, avoided flickering it happened when switching selection of first-level node and first child done, where the option dialog to show are the same.
Performance:
Data Extraction: memory consumption improvement (since we do not store the full URL of each row item).
Various:
GSC Search Analytics options: pre-packaged date range options now follow for the start date the convention used in the new GSC, which often is one day before what you normally see in the old UI of the Google Search Console (it also depends on your time zone, you might have never noticed it).
Improved crash auto-diagnostics for crashed that might occur during a site crawl.
They are very rare nowadays, but being able to reproduce them took us sometimes far too many hours. Now we should be able to more easily pinpoint them and fix them in a shorter time.
Fixes:
Fixed a crashing bug that could have occurred when during crawling the spider met a "mailto:" address where the column symbol were not the standard ASCII column symbol.
Fixed regression: closing the tab with a crawl in progress wasn't any longer prevented, and subsequent crashes might have occurred with the spider still crawling and the program trying to send paint events to the no longer existing UI.
GSC options window: the property combo did not load and pre-select the first time the window was invoked.
Launch Panel (left panel): by clicking between "Crawl View" and "Folder View" a message box popped up warning "Feature not available".
Thanks to S.T. who first spotted and reported the issue.
Fixed UI regression: Manage Sessions tab title was always in English also when the selected application language was a different one.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.8.3.9 (May 28, 2018)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.8.2.21 (May 2, 2018)

New features:
URL Suggestions: seven new reports dedicated to URL canonicalization issues added.
HTML Suggestions basic "first H1" reports (only works for crawls made with VSS 1.6.4 or greater).
Note: these are "low hanging fruits" reports, you can get more H1..H6 complete insights with Data Extraction and Custom Filters features.
Usability / UX:
URL Suggestions, default report order now rearranged in (pseudo) order of what should normally be looked at first (well kind of, we did also some logical grouping, and priority order always depends on the single case).
HTML Suggestions, default report order now rearranged in (pseudo) order of what should normally be looked at first (well kind of, we did also some logical grouping, and priority order always depends on the single case).
Now HTML Suggestions have - initially collapsed - right-pane views (session, properties, content and DOM).
Now URL Suggestions have - initially collapsed - right-pane views (session, properties, content and DOM).
Suggestion trees now load more smoothly and with precise percentage progress.
Pro Trial registration: improved layout, and text rewritten to make it clearer.
"Insert Activation Code" form: improved layout, and changed a sentence to remove the less readable passive form (EN and IT languages).
Some menu icons look now sharper and clearer.
Create Sitemap window UI slightly revisited:
crawl session details are now shown in a (initially collapsed) right panel saving vertical space on the left side; controls have been rearranged to more pleasantly align.
HTML Suggestions: now summary list take all the available vertical space to show as many rows as possible.
URL Suggestions: now summary list take all the available vertical space to show as many rows as possible.
Various:
Pro Trial evaluation period is now 15 days.
Community Edition only: now Suggestion Grids - currently only seen in HTML Suggestions in Community Edition - show only a limited number of items.
Community Edition only: now Suggestion Trees - currently only seen in HTML Suggestions in Community Edition - 1st and 2nd level nodes are limited in number.
Page Js/Css: now data block scripts are skipped.
Feature "URL Suggestions" is now available only in the Professional Edition and Pro Trial, and no longer in the Community Edition.
Suggestions tree views: now they load a maximum of 10.000 child nodes under each 1st level node.
This keeps performances acceptable for very large data sets.
Help menu, added link to Facebook pages of Visual SEO Studio.
GA Suggestions is now less subject to false positives as it searches for tracking code markers only within script blocks.
Fixes:
Fixed freezing bug which affected "GA Suggestions", "Performance Suggestions" and "hreflang Analysis".
It was triggered by switching to "Session" view, and then selecting a page item.
Fixed crashing bug which could have occurred to the Find features when meeting an URL "hard to parse" containing square brackets.
A bug in Windows low level graphics code prevents the program to correctly measure the width in pixel of some texts in Marathi language, and caused the piece of software to crash.
This workaround simply avoids the program to crash, the program gives up correctly measuring those texts for the sake of stability.
Thanks to S.J. who provided us with a project file to reproduce the problem.
Fixed real-world crash occurred to one user: apparently he/she succeeded saving a Data Extraction column set with empty name bypassing validation, which caused a subsequent crash when the program tried to suggest a column set name.
The fix makes the program robust against the dirty data; we have not been able to reproduce the original root cause bypassing validation.
Fixed real-world crash occurred to one user: in a corner case a badly formed link crashed the Links Inspector.
Fixed real-world crash occurred to one user: in a corner case sorting a grid over the URL column caused the program to crash.
Links Inspector: fixed rare (it occurred to only four users over more than a year) race condition that could have crashed the program while loading links grouped in one of the tree views.
GA Suggestions: removed performance bug. Now computation is dramatically faster.
Main tabs: context menu items (for English language version only) "Close tab", "Close all but this tab" and "Close all tabs" appeared without text.
This is a regression we had since 1.7.0, sorry guys. Now is fixed at least.
SERP snippet preview in case of non canonical page was showing the URL of the canonical page (in the future for non canonical cases we will likely decide to point it out, and keep giving a preview "as it would be if the page were canonical").
URL Suggestions: count of non-canonical pages didn't take into account canonicalized page to a URL differing in casing only.
HTML Suggestions: duplicate title tags - restricted to the case of canonical pages only - was not case sensitive in computing the canonical.
HTML Suggestions: duplicate description tags - restricted to the case of canonical pages only - was not case sensitive in computing the canonical.
Performance suggestions: data block scripts were not skipped from the count; now only javascript mime type blocks are computed.
Typos fixed (all languages).
Some button non-English texts did not fit the available horizontal space, and have been split in two lines.
URL Suggestions: reports named "Canonical not matching Path (Casing only)" and "Canonical not matching Path (Casing only)" renamed to "Canonical not matching URL" and "Canonical not matching URL (Casing only)" as these last names more correctly describe what the reports do (all languages).
Updated tree view open source component, this brings several minor stability fixes.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.8.1.2 (Jan 15, 2018)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.8.0.9 (Jan 10, 2018)

New Features:
Crawl options: number of maximum concurrent connections.
Available in all crawl option windows (normal crawl, sitemap audit, list of URLs, multi-site crawl), permits to specify the maximum number of threads to use to perform parallel HTTP requests. Current limitations we set are:
Community Edition:
up to 2 (default value) threads
Professional Edition:
Max 32 threads for verified sites (default is 5)
Max 5 threads for non-verified (default is 5)
Custom Filters: new operands for URL property: "Is canonical" and "Is not canonical".
Performance:
A brand new multi-threaded spider engine, now 2-3 times faster.
The crawler now makes better use of multi-core architecture and parallel processing. It still remains adaptive avoiding to overload the server, but continually tests the server throughput making a number of concurrent connections and then giving it time to complete them.
The number of threads set is a maximum number. The program (and the .net framework, and the underlying OS) may limit it based on the number of processors/cores and other evaluations.
Crawling: Memory check-points management fine-grained.
Crawl time: improved responsiveness of UI when processing many visual events. The UI is now dramatically less likely to freeze in case of large crawls. The involved visual components - the crawl treeview and the Output window - now update more quickly and smoothly.
Parsing links now is about 20% faster. The gain during crawl can be of up to 10' for 150K URLs, and a couple of seconds for 500 URLs (it actually all depends on the machine, we took these measures on an old notebook).
We suppressed a feedback message that carried very little information (and no one probably ever noticed it) and could have been a potential bottleneck in case a long sequence of particular events occurred.
Usability/UX:
Color scheme changed for some UI elements.
With 1.7 we addressed some usability issues by evidencing the most important "call to action" buttons, sometimes not noted at first sight by users. We did that by changing their size, and colour. For the latter we used an "acid green" which certainly users did notice - so we improved usability - but would largely find it annoying because too bright. In practice, we increased "Usability" and worsened "User Experience". This new colour scheme corrects the mistake by using a much more pleasant pastel green. Along with it, we changed accordingly the background of the left side "Command pad" panel.
Report summary pages, now the first column - clickable - is underlined only when the mouse hovers over it.
This makes the UI appear less clogged, and some users lamented it looked from the '90s.
End of crawl, summary in Output window no longer can appear intermixed with other messages; it now also is a little more compact.
"Pro Trial registration" form:
Layout made prettier and easier to read/understand; action buttons resized and now using new style; better fitting texts; better text box label in error case.
"Insert activation code" form:
Layout made prettier, with clearer buttons; UX improved; better textbox label in error case; form not shown in taskbar (uniformed behaviour to other windows).
Start page, current project name box is now right-aligned with other controls.
Crawl multi-site window, options hidden in collapsible panel, OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
Crawl sitemap window, options hidden in collapsible panel, OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
Crawl URL List form: OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
Start page: session grid columns width is now fixed and resizable; column "Visited pages" is now right-aligned with some right-padding, columns order and width rearranged.
Manage Sessions page: column "Visited pages" is now right-aligned with some right-padding, columns order and width rearranged.
Various:
Textual notations uniformed (various languages).
Fixes:
Exporting to sitemap could crash if it met a badly formed URL (happened to one user only, it was a very corner-case occurrence).
XML sitemaps (audit and validation): parsing xml sitemaps when no whitespace separator existed between the url elements skipped every second element.
Thanks to J.B. for reporting the issue.
Fixed parsing error of anchor text having nested HTML comments (the comment was previously extracted as part of the anchor text).
Typos fixed (various languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.7.1.4 (Dec 7, 2017)

Usability/UX:
Pro Trial expired dialog, cancel button text colour made more readable.
Upgrade to Professional dialog, cancel button text colour made more readable.
Various:
Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration dialog: we restored displaying property sets. We did hide them with 1.7.0 as they have a cryptic name making a poor user experience, yet as soon as we did users pointed out they are too useful to get rid of them (e.g. they are useful in the transition period of an HTTP-HTTPS migration, when protocol URLs are indexed). In the future we might display them only optionally.
Fixes:
Fixed real-world crash occasionally occurring when an crawl started. This is a regression introduced with 1.7.0 by an optimization. We couldn't reproduce it, but on some clients' machines evidently occurred.
Fixed crash condition occurring to some users when opening the "Crawl URL List" window. We are not sure about what triggered the crash (we were not able to replicate the issue), but this fixes it.
Links Inspector: in case of destination non-explored (e.g. due to a timeout), calculated values "Destination receives PR" and "Destination wastes PR" were not processed correctly.
Links Inspector: in case of destination page blocked by robots.txt, calculated values "Destination receives PR" and "Destination wastes PR" were not processed correctly.
Links Inspector, calculated value "Destination wastes PR": while the business logic computed the field using the (here simplified) rule "(noindex AND nofollow)", the user interface treated it as it was "(noindex OR nofollow)". We decided to make it behave like the latter "(noindex OR nofollow)" because it helps to point out "half wastes", e.g. when destination is "noindex, follow" (half waste: it passes received PR internally, but doesn't use it to position itself) or it is "index, nofollow" (half waste: it uses received PR to position itself, but doesn't pass it internally).
Links Inspector, links by "anchor-text" tree: the treeview showed Source URL (already shown under the grouped item) instead of the Destination URL.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.7.0.21 (Nov 27, 2017)

New Features:
A whole brand new feature: Links Inspector:
Both an advanced backlink profile inspector and an internal links analyzer, "Links Inspector" will revolutionize the way users perform backlink audits. Effective break-down pie charts and aggregated views about all interesting link attributes give an immediate idea of how your backlinks (and internal links) are composed. Links can be searched to match several possible filters (internal, external, pointing to a specific domain, etc..). A customizable and fully exportable table will report all links matching the search criterion, and show all important link attributes. Many attribute columns are hidden not to overcrowd the view, and let user concentrate on the most important stuff. The tool computes and applies all necessary checks to report whether a link can pass PageRank, and in case if such PageRank is received by the destination URL and not wasted. User can enable visibility of all possible property and can manually inspect with a single click the link source code in Content and DOM view to double check on his own. Cherry on the cake, a powerful classifier can detect the type of link (footer, content, comment, etc...).
Page Links bottom pane now has a new "Link type" column to classify the link (content link, footer link, comment link...)
Usability/UX:
UI revamped:
Now the most important call to action buttons are easier to spot: bigger, with bold test and a light green background.
Redundant borders in the UI have been removed to make it lighter, and some texts were made easier to understand.
Some windows have been re-designed to make their mission clearer.
These are the first steps of an ongoing process.
"Administered sites" renamed as "Verified sites" (all languages), a term likely more familiar to users.
The term "administered sites is still used in some auxiliary texts for clarity sake and to avoid repetitions.
"Index View" renamed as "Folder View" (all languages), a clearer and less confusing term.
Manage Sessions window: toolbar and context menu entry order rearranged (as also done in main menu and left-side command pad) based on their popularity.
Pro Trial registration form: now the final success notification is a little more pleasant to read.
Pro Edition activation key inserted form: now the final success notification is a little more pleasant to read.
Crawl session window: crawl options were confusing users, giving too much information than normally needed and making user lose focus on what really mattered.
Now they are collapsed and user can show/hide them using a link.
Readability form: now right pane tools start collapsed.
GA Suggestions form: now right pane tools start collapsed.
Find results panel: now top window controls share the same toolbar style look and feel of the other panels.
Page links bottom pane: now the toolbar displays the full URL of the resource, not only its path.
(Italian language) "Visita lista URL" renamed as "Esplora lista URL".
(Russian language only) unified notations for view names.
Manage sessions form: right-click context menu entries for "Crawl view" and "Folder view" (formerly "Index View") now uniformed to general naming convention (all languages).
Community Edition: when a crawl completes because the maximum number of 500 pages has been hit (limitation of the Community Edition) a window pops up to clearly explain it.
Upgrade to Pro Edition window made clearer.
H1..H6 window: removed from upper toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
view switcher used at the top of Crawl, Index and Tabular views: removed minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
hreflang checker: now right pane tools start collapsed.
hreflang checker: removed from language directives viewer toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
hreflang checker: removed from hreflang viewer toolbar minor, disabled, useless, confusing UI grip element.
hreflang checker: page URL in language directives viewer now stretches over the whole available horizontal space.
hreflang checker: page URL in hreflang viewer now stretches over the whole available horizontal space.
Page CSS and Scripts bottom pane: grids now show a progressive row number in the row header (regardless how data is sorted).
Page Images bottom pane: grid now shows a progressive row number in the row header (regardless how data is sorted).
DOM view side panel now shows on top of it the URL of the resource (the view is also used on reports where the context of the URL is not immediate, so this makes it crystal clear).
Content side panel now shows on top of it the URL of the resource (the view is also used on reports where the context of the URL is not immediate, so this makes it crystal clear).
Page headings H1..H6, added Page URL field.
"Screen Shots" set of tool moved after "XML Sitemaps" and "Robots.txt", since they are less used.
Page Links bottom pane: column "target" resized and centered.
Multi crawl form: "OK" button renamed to "Crawl".
All context menu entries "Copy Full URL" renamed to "Copy URL" (all languages).
Crawl dialogs (normal crawl, sitemap auditing, list of URL, multi-site): main C2A button is now much easier to spot.
Custom Filters form: C2A button now much easier to spot.
Data Extraction form: C2A button now much easier to spot.
XML Sitemap creation form: C2A button now much easier to spot, and reacts to Enter key.
Readability Analysis form: C2A button now much easier to spot, and reacts to Enter key.
Grids, a new dialog enables choosing the visibility of multiple columns. You can invoke it from the grid context menu (right-click on the upper-left gear icon).
Replaces the old approach of expanded menu: changing visibility to more columns was little usable, especially in case of grids with many columns.
Supports undo function and customization persistence.
Notice the new approach also supports columns added dynamically at a later time (e.g. data extraction, or GSC search analytics columns...).
Non-crawled Items window: Added "Referrer URL (decoded)" column, and hidden by default column "Referrer (decoded)" (path only).
HTTP Issues window: Added "Referrer URL (decoded)" column, and hidden by default column "Referrer (decoded)" (path only).
Search Results window: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
Non-crawled Items windows: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
HTTP Issues windows: Added "URL" column, and hidden by default columns "Authority" and "Path (decoded)". They carried the same meaning, combined, but took more real estate space and were less pleasant to see due to the Authority column alignment.
The new view switcher control is present on the crawl-time dialog thus allowing the user to quickly switch between views once the crawling session has ended
Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration dialog: list of sites used to include property sets. Selected, they would work, but their name is not available via API (v.3), there is only a cryptic ID that made a poor user experience (especially when there are more than one), so we prefer to hide them.
Crawl option "Crawl also outside of start folder" checkbox position indented to make it clearer you have to untick the option "Crawl sub-domains" above it in order to have it enabled.
Suggestion trees now sport a new toolbar to substitute the old detail controls. It is more pleasant to see and better fits text lengths staying aligned with the rest of the UI.
Suggestion tables now sport a new toolbar to substitute the old detail controls. It is more pleasant to see and better fits text lengths staying aligned with the rest of the UI.
Progress bars now all show a decimal digit when displaying percentages, and the progress percentage is updated at least every ten seconds, thus giving more feedback when processing huge amounts of data.
UI: Tabular View client area better aligned with other views.
Tree views now all exactly aligned in Crawl view, Index view and crawl time windows. Crawl-time window controls rearranged (overlay panel was in an ugly position; bottom controls slightly moved downward).
Better alignment of UI controls on real time crawl user interface.
UI tweak: in "hreflang Analysis", the padding of the first tab "With hreflang" has been uniformed to the other tabs padding.
Grids, context menu command that appears clicking on the upper-left corner gear icon: the add/remove columns icon has been updated lest it were confused with other functions.
Tabular view: added top-right button to quickly add GSC "search analytics" data column (one could have added it via context menu right-clicking the top-left gear icon, but this button is much easier to spot). Top right buttons re-arranged and made a little less invasive.
Crawl URL List form: checkboxes for advanced options are now hidden to make the window less confusing (their default values are most of the times good). They can be expanded/collapsed with a click.
Performance:
Fixed major performance bottleneck mostly affecting large crawls (when several tens of thousands of URLs had already been crawled, so the slow down wasn't perceived with small crawls of few hundreds of URLs).
Removed speed bottleneck which impacted crawl performances in case of large crawls with big numbers of queued items waiting to be crawled. It's just a drop in the bucket, other crawl performance improvements will come in the near future.
Minor performance gain when crawling: in case of depth limit, links are not parsed.
Minor improvement in crawl performances.
Now loading from DB is somewhat faster.
Various:
Crawl: the program now permits to set max crawl depth to zero, typically to only crawl the Home Page (previous min depth was one).
Note: one could have set the maximum number of pages to 1 to obtain the same results.
We are now using a new digital certificate to sign our programs.
This might mean for the first few hundred uses to install the new version to have to grant a confirmation button more than usual in the browser or OS subsystem, until the new certificate will gain enough trust. This is the way trust-based certificates work, sorry guys.
Installer: we dropped the user survey on uninstall (you might occasionally see it if you are updating and older version, but that would be the last).
Now that Find function searches in the whole URL and not only in the URL path, the search criteria string has been updated.
Find pages dialog: first option renamed from "Search in URL path" to "Search in URL" (all languages); now it actually works for the full URL.
"Crawl URL List": the spider now follows cross-domain redirects when crawling a URL list.
This makes easier to audit cross-domain migration or redirected backlink profiles.
Fixes:
Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration dialog: fixed crash which could have occurred when clicking on the operator column header.
One real user actually experienced, sorry mate!
"hreflang Analysis": fixed crashing condition occurring when selected a tab with zero elements and trying to visualize the hreflang items list or the language directives bottom panes.
Fixed crashing condition which occurred to one user when selecting an accept-language value for a customized crawl. We were unable to actually reproduce it, but the the current fix makes it impossible to occur again.
Fixed potential crashing condition that could have occurred using in some cases the "empty grid helper", no real user had been affected by this issue.
"hreflang Analysis", switching tabs didn't update the current page reported by the bottom and right panes.
"Find in grid": if no cell was initially selected, the first cell in the grid was skipped from search.
"Find in grid" couldn't find values in cells if the underlying data type wasn't pure text. Now if a text is displayed in the grid cell, it will be found.
HTML Suggestions: criteria rule for meta description truncation is "more than 2 lines", but the UI stated "more than 3".
HTTP Issues bottom panel: a couple of columns (site authority name and path decoded) were not visible and not selectable, they are now not visible and user can select them. Non selectable (and still visible) - i.e. mandatory - is now the "URL" column.
Manage Sessions form: right side "crawl session" window didn't always populate with selected crawl session row.
"Crawl session" side window: some field values didn't update their translations when switching language.
Crawl session window: tab order fixed.
Readability analysis: fixed potential crashing condition that could have occurred had the user clicked on Compute button while the program was still loading pages data from DB. Now the buttons is disabled during that phase.
Fixed wrong behavior that prevented some users to complete registration of the Pro Trial (when the program was closed before inserting the license serial number).
Grids: clicking on the expandable "Pick columns" menu item (right click context menu on the gear icon in the upper-left corner) invoked the "Search in grid..." dialog.
Crawl URL List window: checkbox option "For robots.txt file, treat a redirection to [other domain]/robots.txt as 'full allow'" was wrongly anchored and disappeared when resizing the window.
Typos fixed (all languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.6.4.22 (Jul 26, 2017)

New Features:
New command "Find referring link to URL" makes it easier to locate links referring to pages, in order to correct the links.
Available as context menu commands from "HTTP Issues" and "Non crawled items" panes, from Tabular/Crawl/Index, and at crawl time.
First H1 title found now extracted with the meta data and shown in Property window and Tabular View, along with the number of H1s found.
Note: you'll have to recrawl in order for them to show up there. There still is comprehensive reporting for H1..H6 in Custom Filters, and the H1..H6 viewer, working for old crawls as well.
Usability/UX:
Crawl, Index and Tabular Views now sport a top "switch view" toolbar. From a view of a single crawl session it permits to jump directly to other views.
For example from the Crawl Session view the user can jump to the Site Index View and to the Tabular View.
If the chosen view is already open for the current crawl session, the pre-existing tab is selected instead of creating a duplicate (note: a tabular view opened as a result of the application of a custom filter or other filtering operations doesn't show the "switch view" toolbar).
A 'Home' button has been added to jump directly to the session management window.
Create Sitemap window, selected nodes texts of non-canonical pages (normally hidden, but user can optionally get them appear) are no longer colorized when selected, to make them clearly readable (white text with blue background).
Crawl and Index Views, selected nodes texts of non-200 pages are no longer colorized when selected, to make them clearly readable (white text with blue background).
Crawl, Index and Tabular View headers uniformed to have the "Find Pages..." button and the Legend in the same position. Legend is now easier to spot.
Various:
Crawl URL List (and Multi Crawl) now permit cross-protocol exploration. This makes easier testing HTTP to HTTPS migrations.
Crawl parameters: maximum download size is now 2000 KB (default stays 200 KB).
Community Edition only: the Professional Edition "Trial" registration form now re-designed to make it the opportunity clearer.
The Pro Trial registration form is always shown at the program startup. If the user already used the Pro Trial period, she/he is asked whether she/he wants to purchase the Professional Edition license.
Fixes:
Fixed rare crashing condition (reported only once by a single user) that could have occurred while loading a grid (asynchronous programming can be tricky!).
Fixed rare crashing condition (reported only once by a single user) that could have happened when inserting an activation code.
Fixed real world crash occurring occasionally when opening in Crawl View a highly nested tree.
Fixed potential crashing condition (never reported by any real user) that could have occurred on some machine when selecting nodes in options dialog.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.6.3.11 (May 15, 2017)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.6.2.2 (Apr 3, 2017)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.6.1.16 (Mar 1, 2017)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.6.0.12 (Feb 13, 2017)

NEW FEATURES:
Google Search Console "Search Analytics" integration:
Users of the Professional and Professional Trial editions can now add columns with "Search Analytics" data (Clicks, Impressions, CTR and average Positions) to Tabular View (so also including all Custom Filters result sets), to Data Exctration and to Readability Analysis reports
For each URL row in the tables the corresponding search analytics data are added in new columns. New columns can of course be sorted, re-arranged and will be included when exporting to Excel or CSV
User can fully configure search analytics setting to decide which data to retrieve (i.e. dates range, traffic type... all the options available in Google Search Console) and specify as well as many query term filters as they wish (for example to exclude all branded keywords)
The process can be repeated for further refinements, the settings window will remember the previously set values, and the columns data will be updated. At the moment we decided to limit the amount of data retrieved via Google API to the top 5000 URLs
USER EXPERIENCE / USABILITY:
Bad UX issue fixed: now the Professional Edition activation form (accessible thorough the "Insert Activation code..." menu item command) can also activate the Pro Trial edition.
30-day Trial registration form: watermark example added to the Activation Code field to let the user understand where to paste the activation code.
Google API authentication (previously used only to retrieve administered sites, now also used by search analytics integration) Access tokens are not saved and refreshed when needed, no need to ask user to authorize each time for the same task.
FIXES:
Fixed crashing condition occurred to a user who crawled a root address as a sitemap (and the program didn't warn him), and then inspected hreflangs. Now the program doesn't crash in the case. Another fix will address the root cause.
When switching edition from Community to Professional Trial or Professional paid edition (upon inserting an Activation Code) left side panel didn't correctly show all enabled options (they were anyway available thorough the top menu, and shown at subsequent program launches).
Administered sites verification: fixes error occurring when the Google credentials where not bound to any Google Search Console property. Thanks to Andrea Pernici for reporting the error.
Fixed real world crash which occurred during crawling when the spider met a link with href starting with "http:" or "https:" but missing the double slash // part (e.g. href="https:www...")
Typos fixed (all languages) in user interface texts.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.5.2.21 (Jan 26, 2017)

New Features:
hreflang analysis from XML Sitemaps.
Now when the crawl is generated from an XML Sitemap (or an Index Sitemap, or a robots.txt listing sitemaps) hreflang links in the XML Sitemaps are taken into account, and shown in the hreflang viewer.
Custom Filters: added a new querable property to filter all the pages containing IMG tags based on the value of the 'alt' attribute text (empty or missing, and or other operands applicable to text values: contains, starts with, etc...).
Custom Filters: added a new querable property to filter all the pages containing IMG tags based on the value of the 'title' attribute text (empty or missing, and or other operands applicable to text values: contains, starts with, etc...).
Custom Filters: A new "Images" querable properties group is available, containing the previous two querable properties and the one about the number of images in a page, previously found in the "Performance" group.
Telemetry: the program can now send anonymous usage statistics to our backend servers. User can disable or enable the feature at will. Telemetry data are strictly anonymized and do not track any personal data, only used feature, program performances and UI responsiveness.
The data once received on our backend server is aggregated and put at disposal of our developers to improve software quality.
User Experience / Usability:
"hreflang Viewer": all columns are now sortable (those with icons - e.g. tests - were not). For those that comprise a "no state" sorting can be weird as the "no state" (e.g. no nations specified, represented by no icon) and a valid test (e.g. valid nation code, represented by a green tick) are not distinguished when sorting. Better than nothing.
Export to Excel and Csv: a more meaningful file name is generated when the user exports data from reports.
Robustness:
XML Sitemap crawling: in the corner-case of an XML Sitemap using extensions (e.g. hrelang) but (wrongly) not adding the namespace extension, the XML Sitemap "Loc" URLs were not parsed and the crawl stopped at the sitemap level.
Now the spider is robust against the error, and reports it in the Validation panel.
Various:
Crawling: max crawl depth elevated to 500 to permit site owners with hugely paginated sites (and contents buried too deep) to crawl the content and generate sitemaps. Default stays at 5.
License update: a new statement has been added to Article 5 section A.
Fixes:
XML validation: fixed crashing bug occurring in case of XML Sitemaps using namespace extensions but (wrongly) not declaring the extension namespace.
The crash didn't trigger the crash notification window, so we are not sure whether anyone as really ever experienced it (it's a corner-case).
Fixed real-world crash. The name of exported report files was too long if the user gave a very long name to the exported session.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.5.1.8 (Jan 9, 2017)

New Features:
"hreflang Analysis": added full support for hreflang HTTP headers
Crawling/indexing: support for canonical link HTTP header.
Added new Custom Filter for string fields: 'Contains any of'.
Useful to search for specific words in the html pages, for example searching for hacked pages; even if it could be achieved with an OR cascade, this way it's more straightforward and - in case of a big number of terms - performs faster.
Custom Filters UI: it is now possible to create a new custom filter from an existing one.
Data Extraction UI: it is now possible to create a new expression set from an existing one.
Limited support for proxy authentication during the crawl: now current user Windows credentials are used for the default proxy configured in Internet options.
"hreflang Analysis": added report "Conflicting language directives":
Reports all pages where language directives (self-referring hreflang, 'lang' attribute in HTML tag, 'content-language' meta tag, and the language automatically detected in title, meta description and content) do not match. Language detection for title and description require a minimum of five words to attempt a good guess. Still not perfect, tends to err for short titles so this report only raises a warning.
"hreflang analysis": added new bottom pane "Page language directives" viewer:
Shows the single page language directives (self-referring hreflang, 'lang' attribute in HTML tag, 'content-language' meta tag), and the language automatically detected in title, meta description and content.
"Readability analysis": added "Detected Language" column:
It recognizes (or tries to) the text language and - if the detected language is different than the selected one - it will have a red background to warn that the shown readability formulas are not meant for the page language.
User Experience / Usability:
Export to Excel or CSV: the file name proposed has now a more meaningful name, including the report name and the crawled domain name. For the data extraction form the name also contains the name of the expressions set.
For the tabular view the name contains the applied filter name.
"Readability Analysis", added "Copy URL" and "Browse URL" context menu commands.
The stop button is shown also for data extraction form.
hreflang viewer: the "hreflang" column has now the name in lowercase.
We normally uppercase column names representing html attributes, but this one length made it less readable.
Various:
"Readability" now also shows bottom pane SERP snippet preview to make it easier checking the page elements language.
"hreflang Analysis" now also shows plain text side panel to make it easier checking the page elements language.
"hreflang Analysis" now also shows bottom pane SERP snippet preview to make it easier checking the page elements language.
The splash form does not longer appear in the taskbar.
Copyright updated to year 2017
Credits, added NTextCat library entry.
Fixes:
Fixed real world crash occurring in the UI in some instances when the system calendar was Persian, Saudi Hijri (Um Al Qura), or Japanese.
This was a long standing bug we had a hard time to reproduce and fix (as it wasn't always occurring). Thanks to the user who helped us tracking it down.
Several report tabs sport a "Stop" button to interrupt a long elaboration and see at least a partial result. Unfortunately the Stop button didn't show up the first time the report was launched.
Fixed potentially crashing condition that could have occurred in "hreflang Analysis" when the bottom pane were collapsed. Never happened to a real user.
Custom Filters: the 'Is And / Is Or' radio buttons in the UI did not work properly and AND was always applied and persisted. We believe the regression was introduced with 0.8.25, the error has never been reported by any user.
Fixed real-world crash in hreflang analysis occurring when the value in href attribute could not be correctly parsed.
Fixed crash condition affecting the Community Edition at program launch when no Internet connection was not available.
This issue had never been reported by real users so far ...but if there was no network connectivity how could the crash ever have been reported?
Typos fixed (various languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.5.0.25 (Dec 5, 2016)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.4.2.21 (Nov 21, 2016)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.4.1.6 (Nov 7, 2016)

New Features:
Table View can now also export dataset to XML sitemap format.
Since the tabular view is also used to show subsets resulting from a Custom Filter, this allows you to create customized XML Sitemaps listing URLs resulted from advanced search criteria.
Custom Filters, added ability to search by status code (search for exact value, status code family, etc...)
Not only this is a handy feature per-se; added with the new possibility to export to a sitemap the content of a Tabular View (used to show results of Custom Filters) you can for example create temporary XML Sitemaps listing old redirected URLs to ease re-indexing times after a migration (a working practice once frowned upon by Google, but now even suggested in their migration guide).
User Experience / Usability:
Create XML Sitemap: now after exporting the data to the XML sitemap file user has a feedback the operation concluded, asked if he/she wants to open the exported file.
Page links bottom pane window: user can now select multiple cells to ease copying their content (with CTRL+C as usual).
Fixes:
Added a fix and a fallback workaround for the secure Secure HTTPS channel used by the program to communicate with the backend server. The channel is used to notify availability of updated versions, messages to the author, crash notifications, and other minor tasks.
The channel experienced several failure in the previous days due to a server certificate configuration error out of our control. This caused "check for updates" not always notifying of an updated version when an older release was used, users occasionally not being able to complete the Pro Trial registration, and occasional crashes when users tried to communicate with us using the built-in messaging window.
We added a fix and a fallback workaround so at least those updating to this release will not experience the problems. Thank you to Danilo Chiantia for reporting the issue first.
We apologize for the inconvenience. It was out of our control, but we should never have trusted a system out of our control.
Fixed Polish translation of new texts appeared with release 1.4.0

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.4.0.50 (Oct 17, 2016)

NEW FEATURES:
Custom Filters, new links operand: "Links to an exact URL".
Page Links bottom pane: added a link to search for all internal in-links to the selected page.
Crawl, Index and Tabular views: added context menu option to search for all internal in-links to the selected page.
DOM viewer: context menu on an element has now "Copy XPath" option. The computed XPath is optimized avoiding indexes when there is no ambiguity, and shortened when an element with an explicit 'id' is found upward along the path.
Data Extraction:
Permits to data mine from the crawled pages, scraping content based on XPath selectors.
Working on pre-crawled data sets, user can repeatedly test, correct aim and refine saving tonnes of time not having to repeat the exploration each time. User can add any number of custom columns to extract data.
In case an XPath expression returns a collection of node instead of a single one, user can choose to keep only the first one (default behaviour) or keep them all. The choice is customizable for each single column of extracted data. In the second case, additional results are reported in the same column to ease data analysis and consumption. Extracted data cells have "Show in code" and "Show in DOM" context menu options. Content, DOM and Session right panel views are available.
User can browse each item URL page with a context menu item ("Browse URL"). All extracted columns are resizable, movable, hidable and sortable.
Readability Analysis, support for a generic "others" language:
Only counters will be shown (and no readability scores) to permit anyway content auditing based on word-count. Sentence termination will be detected using English rules (and thus ignoring common English abbreviations).
USER EXPERIENCE / USABILITY:
Processing Custom Filters can now be interrupted to see only a partial result.
New Crawl dialog: in case of invalid URL inserted a non-obtrusive error icon appears aside the URL.
Start page: when the user double clicks on a row of the start page grid (the one showing all the sessions in the current project) then the "Session Management" form is opened with the project the user double clicked on already selected.
Data Extraction & Readability Analysis: when an error points out a wrong field then the related control gets the focus.
VARIOUS:
Grids, "Find in grid" feature now supports prev/next and optional case sensitiveness.
Uniformed notation, now "URL" is written uppercase everywhere (with the exception of German language, where "Url" is preferred).
FIXES:
When title or meta data contained exceeding internal white spaces, they were not stripped off. Now they are.
URL Suggestions: titles of the histogram views didn't make much sense the way they were stated.
Minor fixes in translations (all languages).
Grids: fixes bug in "Export to excel/CSV" where export operation failed in case of columns with no value.
This never occurred to real-users as the situation was never triggered with real data in previous releases.
Thanks to the beta tester A.C. who spotted and reported the issue while testing the new Data Extraction feature.
UI: when the user changes the UI language now also the grid context menu recalculates its texts to speak the right language.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.3.1.21 (Oct 7, 2016)

New Features:
Readability Analysis: added support for French texts.
Supported readability scores are:
"Kandel-Moles adaptation of Flesch Reading Ease formula for French language" and "Szigriszt's Lisibilité score for French texts".
Readability Analysis: added support for Spanish texts.
Supported readability scores are:
"Fernandez Huerta index" and "Szigriszt Perspicuidad score for Spanish texts".
Readability Analysis: added "Vacca-Franchina 1986" score for Italian texts.
Less known than the 1972 score with the same name, we waited adding it because the Italian Wikipedia page documenting it was clearly badly wrong. After more research we finally found some documentation and results to compare to.
User Experience / Usability:
Readability Analysis: when user inserts an invalid XPath expression, the validation error message was delivered by an obstrusive message box; now it as a much more discrete error pointer within the field.
The splash window is no longer "top most". This was especially a pain for users with slow PCs as it prevented working with other programs in the meanwhile.
The splash windows now has a tiny black border, making it easier to distinguish from the background and making a more pleasant user experience.
Performances:
Readability Analysis: minor speed-up in computing number of syllables in Italian texts.
Various:
Minor corrections in Credits notes.
Fixes:
HTML5 new HTML entities were left unescaped when getting the plain text from the HTML. Affected parsing titles, meta data, and searching the plain text or extracting to compute readability score or show it in the Plain Text view.
1778 out of 2031 HTML5 named entities were not recognized when transforming HTML to plain text and were left unascaped.
Now they all are correctly handled. Furthermore, the transformation is faster.
Fixed real-world crashing condition in Readability Analysis occurring when trying to extract the plain text out of an HTML section containing some uncommon HTML5 named entities. Two users experienced it.
Readability Analysis: abbreviations caused erroneous sentences count. They are now handled for all supported languages.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.3.0.18 (Sep 19, 2016)

NEW FEATURES:
Readability Analysis:
A complete suite to assess the readability of the plain text of your contents
Uses the most notorious readability indexes. All indexes are shown with a colored background to facilitate getting the whole picture
For each page the plain text is shown in a new right-pane detail window
User can specify (recommended) an XPath to indicate where in the page layout the pure content is. Available in a collapsed panel are other options (e.g. to restrict analysis only to some paths, skip empty pages, ...)
The tool itself is a precious help to perform a Content Audit. For each page/section other than the readability indexes also computes the number of words, sentences, characters
Histogram views are available for each computed measure, to easily assess at a glance the overall state
Other side/bottom pane windows are available to help auditing the single pages (e.g. H1..H6 titles, screenshots, ...)
The feature is available (at the moment) for texts in English and Italian
Readability formulas used for English texts: Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Gunning's Fog Index, SMOG index, Automated Readability Index (ARI), Coleman-Liau Index, and the average of the five aforementioned grading school levels
Readability formulas used for Italian texts: Flesch-Vacca score, GULPEASE index
VARIOUS:
Histograms now report Mean and Median values.
Professional Edition: links/commands for non implemented features are now not shown (they were shown as disabled links, generating confusion).
Professional Edition default value for number of pages to be crawled is now set to the maximum value (150K pages); before it was set to half the maximum but generated some misunderstanding.
Features "Custom Filters" and "GA Suggestions" are now only available in the Professional Edition (and not in the Community Edition).
This has not been a lighthearted decision: users love the product and love the Community Edition, so much that far too many don't feel the need to purchase the Professional license for their daily consulting/agency work. We appreciate the product being popular, and want to keep the free version free even for light professional use, yet we cannot risk to impair our economical survival by being our first competitor. The two features are very "Pro"; for example an Analytics health-check is something you perform only occasionally on your own site and can be done with the 30-days Trial. This way the Community Edition is still highly competitive against competition.
Export to Excel/CSV (all grids): better handling of "non-a-number" values generated by "divide by zero" issues.
Improved computation of plain text from the page HTML (impacts search in plain text code in custom filters and in generic search).
Pro Trial registration: improved correctness check of email address field.
UI texts and translations (all languages) improved all over the application.
FIXES:
Fixes crashing condition occurring when the option "Browse Location URL" where used on a redirect HTTP issue in case the crawl come from a list of URLs. Thanks to Andrea Pernici who reported the bug.
Fixed real-world crash occurred to two users when getting the list of administered sites from Search Console APIs. We couldn't replicate the issue (depends on user's data and is an uncommon corner-case), but we are confident this change fixes it.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.2.1.6 (Jun 30, 2016)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.2.0.9 (Jun 5, 2016)

New Features:
French translation available
Visual SEO Studio is now also speaks French. Seven languages to better serve users where ever they are from
GA suggestions now integrate G. Tag Manager detection
Two new report tab are available: "Pages with both GA and GTM tracking codes", and "Pages with neither GA nor GTM tracking codes". At the moment the tool is not able to evaluate scripts at runtime, and cannot know whether GA is enabled via GTM, but the two reported conditions are worth a closer look
User Experience / Usability:
Custom Filters, now the Properties combo box groups properties by category, greatly improving the user experience
Setup UI: Better alignment for checkboxes on the setup main window to improve their readability
Help menu item "Get the Professional Edition..." renamed as "Upgrade to the Professional Edition..." to make it clearer
Help menu item "Upgrade to the Professional Edition..." (formerly "Get the Professional Edition...") now opens an intermediate window explaining that the subsequent step would be to be taken to an HTTPS secure purchase wizard on the product website
Activation form (used to insert the Activation Code for a purchase Professional Edition licence) revamped
The activation code form has now a new label explaining what the activation code is and how the user can get it
User can click on a new button on the activation form to launch the web based purchase procedure
The activation code textbox is now a watermark textbox. The watermark shows an example of activation code
Various:
The software now sports a whole new graphic: splash, logo, icon, etc... like already happened to the website
GA Suggestions, improved detection of GA codes, excluding some false positives
Validation windows, improved usage of UI space
Better use of resources make the program a little lighter even with a language translation more
Fixes:
Fixed rare crashing condition which occurred after saving a screenshot when showing it in the right pane
Screenshot taker: fixed crash that could have occurred when stopping too early before the page screenshot started rendering
Quite rare, occurred to only two users during a couple of years
Fixed real-world crash occurring when showing page links, in some cases where a mailto: link was not well formed
Fixed crashing condition occurring when closing the Custom Filters tab when a filter was in edit state
Fixed multi-threading crashing condition occurred to a user after a previous (still to be fixed crash)
Fixed theoretical crashing condition (no real user ever experienced it), which could have occurred in rare cases by clicked another tab while a report were loading its data

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.1.0.16 (May 3, 2016)

New Features:
The Professional Edition is now available!
You can purchase a licence selecting the proper command from the help menu, you'll be directed to an HTTPS secured purchase wizard. At the completion of the payment you'll receive an Activation Code to insert in the dedicated window.
Crawling HTTPS sites adds support to TLS1.1 and TLS1.2 (other than the usual SSL3 and TLS1.0).
In order to work it need to run on .net framework 4.5 or higher. If .net 4.0 is used, only SS3 and TLS1 are used and some HTTPS sites might not be crawled (the crawl would likely stop attempting to download the robots.txt file, with the message: "An unexpected error occurred trying to download robots.txt prevents crawling. Error is: Send Failure".
Robustness:
In case of huge number of subsequent non-crawled items met during the crawl process, the user interface received far too many micro-events (requiring to update of the UI) than it could handle, and the UI happened to freeze becoming non-responsive.
Now during the crawl process UI events are packaged and handled in batches, so that the program remains responsive.
The application has been hardened against rare possible multi-threaded races.
Various:
Googlebot Smartphone user-agent (available for adm. sites only) updated to latest Google version (see https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/updating-smartphone-user-agent-of.html)
About box now shows licensee and licence info in case of paid Professional Edition subscription.
Setup UI updated with new logo, and enlarged to better fit new stuff.
EULA updated.
Minor robustness added in case of crawl tab closed before time.
Suggestion reports user interface, uniformed height of reports headers.
Help menu, added links to Visual SEO Studio social media accounts (Twitter and Google+).
Help menu items re-arranged, and added commands to purchase licence and insert activation code.
Fixes:
Real world crash fixed: When user ran Html Suggestions report with a very big set of data the program could occasionally crash if the user closed the application.
Real world crash fixed: If the program was closed while a very big crawling session was being deleted then a crashing condition occurred. Now it waits for the deletion to complete.
Real world crash fixed: When there were no recent URLs and the user changed a recent URL form setting then an a crashing condition occurred.
ViewState viewer: fixed real-world crash (thank to Andrea "garethjax" Scarpetta for reporting it) occurring for ASP.NET WebForms generated with MS SharePoint. Now while the content is not completely decoded, at least it doesn't crash.
Fixed crashing condition (no real ever experienced it) which might have occurred when auditing a sitemap with path /?something
Fixed theoretical crashing condition (no real user ever experienced it) which could occur when inspecting old migrated data of pages crawled with an older version of the Pigafetta bot user-agent.
Performance Suggestions: report "Meta charset (non UTF-8) had an inverted logic, and reported pages with actually meta charset set to UTF-8 (and - as it should - no charset set in HTTP header or BOM).
Crawl window: when the crawl options panel was collapsed and user needed to add credentials for HTTP Authentication, user had no clue why the crawl process didn't start. Now the panel is expanded if needed, to show proper messaging.
Typos fixed (various languages), thanks to all the users who reported them.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.0.3.12 (Mar 7, 2016)

New Features:
New crawl option: download of non-200 pages content. Default is true.
Useful for example to inspect them with Performance Suggestions report.
Previously content of non-200 pages were not downloaded, so migrated data will have the option to false. The new feature implies a data migration (fully automated, as usual).
Crawl options, user-agents spoofing (available for administered sites only):
Added Yandex's mobile, ads (Yandex.Direct) and blog bots.
Added Bingbot mobile bots and ads bots (desktop and mobile).
Screenshot taker, added most common mobile resolutions widths.
Screenshots: max screenshots miniature width now customizable. It previously was fixed at 400px, now can be enlarged.
For smaller (mobile) resolutions, the actual screen width is used.
User Experience / Usability:
Crawl Form is now much more compact, with options initially collapsed.
Crawl window: tab "Advanced" split in two: "Advanced" and "Administered Sites" to better fit all controls; controls now better spaced.
Grids, reduced the perceived flickering on images cells when quickly scrolling or switching to a grid view.
Recent URLs options dialog: fixed tab order.
Screenshot miniatures options dialog, added "Restore defaults" button.
Empty grids (Sessions on the Start Page window and Sessions on the Manage Sessions window) now have a clear "Call To Action" telling the user what to do.
Grids customization: when the user customizes the column order then changes are immediately reflected into the Options form.
Robustness:
Fixed theoretical cross-threading crashing condition. So rare and unlikely no user so far seems to have experienced it, we were able to trigger it after several attempts and so we had to fix it.
Various:
Shot Taker, added most common mobile models and resolutions in combo box.
Start Page layout reviewed to remove excessive clogging in the user interface:
The "Open Session Management" is now a button.
The label showing the total number of sessions under the Sessions grid and the redundant crawl button are not present any more.
The "Administered Sites" label has been removed: it was not necessary because of the presence of the groupbox title.
Registration wizard:
The email address inserted by the user is trimmed before calling the server to get the activation code.
About window: the "Hardware Signature" field is back again.
Fixes:
XML Sitemap generation: fixed regression (occurred since 0.9.4 with the introduction of .net 4.0 as minimal prerequisite) where URLs with IDN domain names were not properly encoded.
XML Sitemap generation: fixed regression (occurred since 0.9.4 with the introduction of .net 4.0 as minimal prerequisite) where URLs with hashbang #! part added a non-necessary default port number.
Fixed real-world crash which could occur when launching a "Suggestions" report and closing straight away. It took click speed and bad luck, but did actually occur to a couple of users over time.
Fixed real-world crash occurred to one user. It was triggered during crawling by a link in the from of an data: embedded image.
When a communication error occurred trying to download a resource (e.g. timeout, DNS error, ...) it was wrongly reported as a fictitious HTTP error "306 Unused". Now the proper error is reported, and listed in the "Non crawled items" view.
When the error occurred at the beginning of a crawl process while attempting to download the first robots.txt file, the misleading message was particularly confusing for the user.

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.0.2.7 (Feb 16, 2016)

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.0.1.22 (Feb 15, 2016)

New Features:
"GA Suggestions" can now be stopped before time, and see a partial results (as for huge sites it might take some time to complete).
"GA Suggestions" now sports some right panel tools (Session, Properties, DOM) and bottom panels (Scrips/CSS, other than the already present SERP snippet), to better help locating reported issues.
Added Histogram view to "HTML Suggestions".
Added Histogram view to "URL Suggestions".
User Experience / Usability:
When the right pane was collapsed and user selected on the bottom pane one of the options "Show in Content", "Show in DOM" and "Show blocking directive in robots.txt", the right pane was not expanded. Now it is.
Copy-paste issue on the activation code textbox fixed, thanks Danilo Chiantia for reporting it.
Page Links, columns rearranged (visibility and position).
Various:
Page Images:
added column to indicate if the SRC value is an embedded image (src="data:...");
"Internal" column moved left after robots.txt related columns. SRC column value truncated in case of data URI.
robots.txt parser: dropped support for missed leading / in Allow and Disallow directive (e.g. "Disallow: fish/" was equivalent to "Disallow: /fish/")
It was a non-standard feature added to comply with googlebot specific implementation, but Google dropped it from its specifications and remarked it is not supported
Note: we do still support a leading * though.
Fixes:
DOM view crashed when trying to display node with attributes too long (hundred of thousands of characters, happened for example in case of embedded images encoded in base64).
Fixed real-world crash: embedded images (src="data:...") caused Page Images bottom pane and Performance Suggestions report to crash.
Fixed real-world crash caused by a mailto: link with an HTML entity in the href attribute value.
Fixed theoretic crashing condition (never experienced by any real user) where the software would crash if user selected on one of the bottom panes the option "View blocking directive in robots.txt" when the right pane was collapsed.
When the right pane was collapsed and user selected on the bottom pane one of the options "Show in Content", "Show in DOM", and the content were not previously loaded in the right pane, Content and DOM views appeared blank.
Most links URLs encoded with HTML entities were not properly crawled.
Minor corrections in translations (all languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 1.0.0.14 (Feb 4, 2016)

New Features:
The product now comes in two different "Editions":
"Community Edition" free of charge - even for commercial use - with some some limitation.
Community Edition gets finally rid of the "beta" label. This is the state of the application by default.
"Professional Edition (Beta)"
Still free of charge while entering its own beta phase, Pro Beta is an improved version of Visual SEO Studio. Users can upgrade for free to the "Professional (Beta)" edition by registering with their e-mail address; they'll receive an Activation Code (bound to the user's hardware). Once the Paid Professional version will be ready, they'll be free to choose whether to pay for a Pro license or continue using the Community Edition for free.
Performance suggestions
A unique tool, provides in-depth performance analysis for all pages pages of a crawl session. This is probably the only tool able to inspect performance issues in a holistic way, not limiting only to a single page. The new reports set introduces the usage of right and bottom panel tools to better inspect pages with performance issues. It also introduced the possibility to interrupt the processing and see the partial result without discarding all the work done; this is particularly useful for large data sets, since the thorought reports inspection can take quite some time.
"Performance suggestions" are available for the Professional version only.
New bottom pane tool: Histogram
Give an overall view of how the inspected measure is distrubuited over the entire set of examined pages.
It makes examining the overall site state immediate. We plan to further expand its functionalities in the near future.
At the moment is only used in Performance Suggestions report. Will soon be used also in other "suggestions" reports.
New bottom pane tool: Page Images
Details all the IMG tags used in the page, their URL, alt and title attributes, width and height attributes, their position in source code (clickable, to show them in Content and DOM views), and whether they are blocked by robots.txt (and if so, the blocking directive, clickable to be shown in the full robots.txt content).
New bottom pane tool: Page CSS and JS files
Details all the SCRIPT and CSS style tags used in the page, their URL if external, whether they do block rendering, their position in source code (clickable, to show them in Content and DOM views), and whether they are blocked by robots.txt (and if so, the blocking directive, clickable to be shown in the full robots.txt content).
Options form: user can now customize the projects folder path via UI (it previously was available via config file only).
The option is enabled for the Professional only.
User Experience / Usability:
Property Window: Referrer field now shows the full URL, not only the path part. It was misleading when the Referrer (sub)domain differed from the one of the current resource.
Thanks to Andrea Pernici for pointing out the issue.
When launched from the About window, "Check for updates" form now appears modal on the main form, and the about box is closed.
Various:
Options dialog: suggestions criteria has been split in more forms, each dedicated to a single "suggestions" report.
Translations improved for empty nodes.
About Box, fixed minor UI layout issues in new controls.
"Check for updates" anonymous HTTP requests now pass through HTTPS secure channel.
Typos fixed and texts reviewed (all languages).
About form revisited
Its aspect now changes a little between Community and Professional editions. In the first case is sports a "Get Professional Edition" button; in the latter it shows licencee information and the license serial number. Hardware tab is not shown any more.
Splash window: the product name was not horizontally centered on the splash screen. It also displays current Edition.
Application title bar now also displays current Edition
Fixes:
Fixed all known layout issues when using a DPI setting different from default (commonly 125% or 150%)
Fixed real-world crash occurred to a single user; it was caused by a link using back slashed in some corner-case conditions.
Fixed real-world crashing condition (only one user was ever affected) occurring when a redirected page was redirected (due to a badly configured HTTP header against protocol specifications) to an invalid value which passed through the previously implemented validation net (it was using a mailto: protocol).
Fixed crashing condition at startup which could potentially occur when the initial request for update timed out. It's a regression which was out there since about a month; we have no records of real users ever experiencing it but it the server timed out, it's possible the crash report timed out too and we never received. In case: sorry guys/gals.
Fixed real-world crashing condition (only one user was ever affected) occurring in a rare threading concurrency issue, likely when the program was shutting down.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.7.21 Beta (Jan 4, 2016)

New Features:
New crawl option: Add HTTP header 'Referrer' (the crawler always did it, now it has been made optional).
HTTP Authentication available also for sitemap auditing.
PageLinks now also shows links related to A tags with protocols different than HTTP/HTTPS (e.g. ftp:, mailto:, tel:, skype:, callto: ...)
Custom Filters, new querable text property: Meta Description.
User Experience / Usability:
Left side Launch Pad links are now underlined only on mouse hover, based on users' feedback (someone said it looked like old Navigator back from the 90ties).
Suggestion trees: in case of value with multi-line text, the node appeared blank or with non-centered text (the control actually did center the multi-line text vertically, so that and in many cases appeared blank).
Now only the first line is shown (but the entire text string is used for the computation).
SERP snippet preview in all HTML/URL/GA Suggestions are now shown with a collapsible tool window (like in the Views).
This not only permits a better use of screen real estate space for users with smaller monitors, but also opens the possibility to show other tool windows when needed.
Custom Filters tab: when loading a new project, the tab if open now stays open (it's not dependent on the project).
Various:
UI - Options, Last Recent URLs: items are now deletable (multiselection is available)
Minor improvements in UI translations (various languages).
Translations improved (all languages).
Fixes:
Textual meta tags (e.g. meta description) were not trimmed when crawling/extracting meta data.
This could in same cases have made - for example - meta descriptions made of a single blank character be listed for example in the duplicate meta description tags.
Fixed crashing condition occurring when trying to display in a suggestions tree view node an overly lengthy text (several tens of thousand characters). No reports of real uses ever affected.
Fixed real-world crash caused by extremely long several tens of thousands of characters) meta descriptions when trying to compute their length in pixel. Two users were affected, sorry mates.
Crawling: fixed URL resolution caused by unescaped querystring parameters.
Crawling: fixed URL resolution in case of links with href value having an absolute URL with IDN domain non puny-coded.
When attempting to load a project with an unsaved custom filter, the message box stated it was a running crawl session to prevent closure.
Fixed all most prominent UI visualization issues occurring when user had display resolution set to 125% DPI.
Some parts do still have minor visualization issues, and will be fixed as well in the near future.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.6.23 Beta (Nov 24, 2015)

New Features:
Crawl Index, folder nodes have now their properties to display, and a pie chart breaking down sizes.
Content tab view has now a Find feature, with prev/next arrow buttons and shortcuts for CTRL+F, F3, SHIFT+F3.
Custom Filters, new queryable property: Full page text (i.e. inner text of the HTML page, boilerplate included).
Find Pages (available from all views): search in page text enabled.
User Experience / Usability:
Find Pages (available from all views): searching large data sets did freeze the UI (especially when inspecting HTML content). Now the UI is kept responsive and a progress bar is shown. User can also decide to interrupt search.
Interrupting the search does not close the search window, so user can refine search.
Page Links, column "Internal" is now an icon column, and the meaning is clearer.
Page Links, column "NoFollow" is now an icon column, and the meaning is clearer.
Page Links, column "robots.txt blocked" is now an icon column, and the meaning is much clearer.
Start page, projects grid: when a project couldn't be loaded (e.g. because of a running crawl session or an unsaved custom filter), along with the message now the blocking tab is selected.
Performances:
Page Links window: computing whether the link is robots.txt blocked and the blocking directive is now twice faster, and the payoff is paid only the first time instead of every time the column had to be shown.
Various:
Options, temporarily removed unused form Credentials (hidden, kept for a rainy day).
Some older translations changed for better clarity (all languages).
Crawl Parameter "max number of URLs" renamed as "max number of pages", as that's what actually does.
Fixes:
Sessions Management - UI control logic issue fixed: selecting a session row with the arrow keys (and not with the mouse) didn't enable/disable toolbar and context menu, so one could even remove a pending crawl session (leading to subsequent errors).
Thanks to Andrea "garethjax" Scarpetta for reporting the bug.
Index View, UI fix: pages with path identical to a directory name didn't show crawl progressive nor page title when the two UI options were enabled.
Index View, UI fix: pages with path identical to a directory name weren't selected in the tree when clicked on a search result or HTTP Issues entry (or anything like that), and the directory node was selected instead.
Fixed real-world crash happened when user clicked on an HTTP issue, caused by a bad-formed URL starting as "/http:/www...".
Thanks to P.C.C. for helping pinpoint the root cause.
Page Links window: in the rare cases where a base tag was specified but the head tag was missing or malformed, relative URLs where not resolved using the base tag value (note: the crawler parser already was robust against the case, the issue only affected data visualization).
In case of non-crawled items, the status code property in "Properties" window did show a misleading value. Now it just shows an empty value.
Thanks to Andrea Pernici for reporting the issue.
Start page, projects grid: when a project couldn't be loaded (e.g. because of a running crawl session or an unsaved custom filter) the clicked row was nevertheless treated as selected.
Crash window resized to better fit Russian translation (you hopefully should never notice it, though!)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.5.30 Beta (Nov 3, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.4.24 Beta (Oct 20, 2015)

User Experience / Usability:
Suggestions grids, everywhere Path and Canonical Path were shown, they have been by default substituted with URL and Canonical URL, to better disambiguate cases of cross-protocol or cross-(sub)domain.
Table View: added column "Canonical URL" (URL decoded); changed default visibility of columns based on users' feedback.
Suggestion Trees: protocol shown for page URL and canonical URL.
All over the application the page property "Authority" (name coming from the official URI RFC: host name and port number, the latter only if different than default) has been replaced with "Authority Name" which in VSS lingo is the same but prefixed with the protocol scheme. This permits to disambiguate cases where both HTTP and HTTPS versions are crawled. Applies to all languages.
Various:
Setup: .NET Framework now detected earlier.
Prerequisites change: At least .NET Framework 4.0 is now required to run the application.
Fixes:
URL Suggestions: reports for duplicated canonicals didn't take into account when there was a difference only in the protocol two canonical paths.
URL Suggestions: report "duplicated URL (case-insensitive) didn't take into account when there was a difference only in the protocol between two crawled URLs.
When a page canonical URL had the same path of the crawled path, but a different (sub)domain and/or protocol, the program didn't distinguish.
The fix solves the issues for future crawls, while for older ones the original protocol/domain information is unfortunately lost. Note: the fix requires an update in the project format.
Cross protocol support, same pages accessible with both http and https versions where fetched only with the first version met, somehow impairing the cross-protocol feature in many cases.
Custom Filters "links to domain" could have resolved incorrectly relative URLs belonging to a subdomain different the start URL.
This in some cases - depending on the queried domain - could have produced an erroneous subset of extracted pages.
Sitemap Creation window: the page counters in the upper-left grid reported an incorrect number of pages (it comprised the number of detected folders).
Fixed UI regression: with 0.9.2 Page Links grid got accidentally moved 30px to the left, partially impairing its usability.
Sitemaps window didn't properly support cross-protocol cases and didn't distinguish the two URL versions (HTTP/HTTPS)
Crawling, UI/UX issue fixed: when only one node was added under the (sub)domain node, the latter stayed collapsed.
Happened for example when only the home page was crawled, or when an unexpected response code in robots.txt prevented further exploration. The latter was particularly annoying as the collapsed node prevented understanding at first sight where the issue was.
Custom Filters "links to domain" could have resolved incorrectly relative URLs belonging to a subdomain different the start URL.
This in some cases - depending on the queried domain - could have produced an erroneous subset of extracted pages.
Cross protocol support, same pages accessible with both http and https versions where fetched only with the first version met, somehow impairing the cross-protocol feature in many cases.
Crawling, UI/UX issue fixed: when only one node was added under the (sub)domain node, the latter stayed collapsed.
Happened for example when only the home page was crawled, or when an unexpected response code in robots.txt prevented further exploration. The latter was particularly annoying as the collapsed node prevented understanding at first sight where the issue was.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.3.78 Beta (Oct 5, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.2.68 Beta (Sep 15, 2015)

New Features:
HTML validation - the "Validation" window shows also all HTML parsing errors found. This is not a full W3C HTML validation, it's a super-fast, local - no need to call a web service - validation of only those errors which could prevent content being correctly understood by humans and search engines. HTML parsing errors are localized. Note: The "Validation window was formerly named "XML Sitemap Validation", it has now been renamed and sports a new icon (and yes, it still does XML Sitemap validation, and is the most complete and fast tool on the market for that!).
Custom Filters, you can now query pages on the number of HTML parse errors found in them. Powerful!
Non-crawled items, when blocked by robots.txt, now show on a new coloumn "robots.txt blocking directive" Disallow directive and it's line number. Clicking on the content cell opens the blocking robots.txt in Content view and hightlights the cited Disallow directive. The same command is also available via context menu entry "Show blocking robots.txt" right clicking anywhere on the row.
Page Links new column, "robots.txt blocking directive", shows for internal links the robots.txt Disallow directive blocking the URL pointed by the link, and it's line number. Clicking on the content cell opens the blocking robots.txt in Content view and hightlights the cited Disallow directive. The same command is also available via context menu entry "Show blocking robots.txt" right clicking anywhere on the row.
"Show blocking robots.txt" context menu command, available from "Page Links" and "Non-crawled items" windows, selects the robots.txt node, shows in the "Content" page the robots.txt content, and highlights the actual robots.txt Disallow directive responsible of the blockage.
"Show in DOM" context menu command.
Available from "Page Links", "H1-H6 page headers" and "Validation" windows, when fired highlights in the DOM window the corresponding HTML/XML element.
Columns order and visibility changes are now persisted. Every time a grid is loaded it will remember the customization. At the moment the feature is available for the Table View grid only.
From the options dialog window user can restore grid layout to its default setting.
"Show in code" context menu command available also for any node (elements, comments, text...) in the DOM view.
User Experience / Usability:
"Line" and "Position" columns in "Page Links", "H1-H6 headers" and "Validation" windows are now clickable links, to make crystal clear the feature is more than that.
They'll pop up a context menu with only the two applicable options: "Show in code" and "Show in DOM".
Crawling: When site exploration was prevented by an unexpected HTTP status code in robots.txt, the crawler reported a misleading reason "Blocked by robots.txt". Now It explains the exact reason, along with the status code met (in Output window).
Crawling: In case of actual robots.txt directive preventing the spider to crawl a site, the related line in robots txt is cited in Output window.
Find result window cells can now be selected (and copied) individually, before the entire row was selected.
Non-crawled items window cells can now be selected (and copied) individually, before the entire row was selected.
Content window, colouring schema changed to get rid of an ugly bright green for script tags and content.
Non-crawled items window now disambiguates the resource protocol.
Performances:
During crawl using "Page Link"s windows to inspect robots.txt impact over links has much less memory footprint.
Page Links, inspecting robots.txt impact over links is much faster in case of links pointing to many (sub)domains.
Various:
Install process: Visual SEO Studio will be launched in the language selected in the setup process (if user keeps the default option to launch the program at installation end).
Setup UI: Back button on the Options form has the arrow image again.
Fixes:
Fixes theoretical crashing condition (no user ever experienced it) when inspecting DOM (GA Suggestion or some Custom Filters) of pages in large data sets.
robots.txt viewer didn't disambiguate among HTTP/HTTPS versions.
DOM window, comments were shown with double opening and closing markup.
Crawl Session window: the used User-Agent wasn't shown in the crawl options summary.
Previously non-localized message now translated.
Typos fixed (various languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.1.23 Beta (Sep 8, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.9.0.11 Beta (Aug 31, 2015)

New Features:
A new engine dramatically decreases memory consumption permitting to crawl much larger sites.
Crawl options max number of crawl-able URLs is now set to 150K thanks to the new architecture (which would allow much more, we'll loose the limit in time in order to better understand and work on all possible bottlenecks).
User Experience / Usability:
The progress bar appearing when opening a new tab now distinguishes three separate phases:
Reading, Processing and Displaying data (and an explicit text details what the show percentage is referring to).
This improves UX when dealing with large data sets and long running tasks.
Loading large data sets from disk and processing them: the progress bar advancement (now split in three phases) values now match much more precisely the actual state of advancement of the task.
Reports progress bar text is now more contrasted and thus more readable.
Crawl and Index Views now do not freeze the UI when loading a large data set and remain responsive.
Improved responsivity of UI for Table View in case of large data sets.
Performances:
During the processing phase of reports needing to elaborate pages HTML content (GA Suggestions and custom filters), the used memory is continuously auto-tuned according to the available memory, and gradually released to the OS as soon as not needed.
This permits to maximize speed performance for large page sets without exhausting the computer memory.
When crawling a web site, the currently fetched URL node is not anymore ensured to be visible. User Experience is not bad (some even prefer it).
Micro-events (HTTP issues and non-crawled items to be shown in UI) packaged in batches, making the processing phases much faster after opening tabs.
When closing a tab during a processing phase, the (possible long running) task is now actually aborted, saving resources.
Various:
"Google Webmaster Tools" authentication options renamed as "Google Search Console" after Google re-branded the service.
Setup UI: better wording for close button.
Setup: in case of installation failure, user can choose to send an installation log to visual-seo.com
Crawl options, default number of crawl-able URLs now set to 75K (half of the new raised limit), now that the new engine permits to crawl larger data sets.
Minor improvements in supporting Windows 10.
Robustness:
Better robustness against Out-of-Memory issues during reports processing phase when dealing with very reduced available memory.
The new engine actually makes the scenario much less likely in the first place.
Improved robustness in case of tabs closed during non-idle phases.
Fixes:
Fixed real-world crash occurring when at application start up users clicked where a side panel link will appear. This long standing issue affected several users.
Fixed real world crash (one anonymous user affected) occurred during validation of an invalid xml document.
Fixed real world crash (one anonymous user affected): searching for a text value in a grid no more selects the cell containing the text if that cell is invisible; that cell is now skipped. Previously it was selected instead, causing VSS to crash. A cell can be invisible because the user decided to hide a column.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.34.12 Beta (Jul 30, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.33.1 Beta (Jul 20, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.32.1 Beta (Jun 16, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.31.1 Beta (Jun 15, 2015)

New Features:
Administered Sites, GWT authentication now uses Google OAuth2 since client login had been deprecated (along with the whole previous version of Webmaster Tools API).
The user now uses a browser window to authorize access to his/her Google Webmaster Tools (now called "Google Search Console", but we are keeping the old name at the moment), complying to the stronger security requirements righly imposed by Google.
Performances:
HTML and URL Suggestions summary pages now load much faster; suggestion trees are loaded only when selected, and have a progress bar to improve UX. This is particularly appreciated when dealing with large data sets.
Suggestion trees now load a little faster, taken singularly.
User Experience / Usability:
When closing the program right after a long crawl, the program waited before closure to finish storing crawled data on disk, giving a fixed message "Saving crawl data on disk..."; now it also reports the updated number of pending items to be saved.
Session Picker form now has a minimum size.
Fixes:
Fix/workaround of real-world crashing issue. When VSS detects a corrupted font then a message is shown suggesting the user to reinstall that font.
Please notice that the program still terminates as couldn't work without the missing system fonts (as would other programs do), but does its best to help the user to understand and fix the issue.
Under a corner-case condition the program didn't close leaving a fixed message "Saving crawl data on disk..." even if no pending items had to be saved. Not sure how many users have been affected.
Fixed crashing condition which might have occurred deleting a project containing a single session when application language was set to Spanish. No real user was ever affected.
FIX: Fixed theoretical crashing condition (no real user was ever affected): user cannot execute reports on a session being saved. That session cannot be deleted.
These problems could theoretically have happened for long crawl processes when the asynchronous storage queue didn't complete yet.
Regression fixed: Manage Sessions form: it is forbidden to delete a still running crawling session.
While it is running, it is also forbidden to execute reports against it. No real user was ever affected by this corner-case issue.
Fixed theoretical crashing condition that could have occurred in some corner-case situations during application startup when showing the splash window.
No real user was ever affected by the issue.
Typos fixed (all languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.30.1 Beta (May 19, 2015)

Performances:
Page Links window was performing poorly when the crawl session spanned through many sub-domains.
Page Links window initialization is now faster.
Slightly sped up fetching all crawl session pages from db.
Page Links was too slow in case of pages withing sessions with many robots.txt files.
Deleting a crawl session is now much faster.
Node selection in trees (Crawl and Index Views) and row selection in Table View is statistically way more responsive.
User Experience / Usability:
Project db upgrade: when upgrading a project database, the last modified date value is updated.
Closing a tab while loading a big crawl session no more freezes the application.
Various:
Setup images updated with the new icon.
Added HR language menu entry (disabled).
Fixes:
Fixed real-world crash occurring when hiding in Table View the first column and then selecting an HTTP issue.
Fixed hypothetical crashing condition (no real user was ever affected) which could occur when visualizing the page links of a page with base attribute pointing to a different sub-domain.
Fixed real-world crashing condition occurring during crawling when base tag had an empty or missing href attribute.
Crawl View (link structure), pages with cross-subdomain referrer where in some cases represented under the wrong sub-domain. The fix required an update to the save format, old crawled data would in some cases be represented wrongly while new crawled data will always be represented correctly.
Fixed a real-world crash occurred when deleting the last crawl session of the list.
Fixes user experience issue: using tabs in the bottom tools pane fired undesired events selecting nodes in the main panes (note: in some cases it still happens, skip this detail in rel.notes)
Fixed issue with sorting grids, where in some cases clicking on cells made weird sorting occur
Page Links window column "robots.txt blocked" wasn't evaluating the link against the correct robots.txt file when the link (sub)domain was different from the one of the linking page.
Fixed crash condition (no real user has been affected) happening when examining links of pages crawled with an older version of the Pigafetta bot.
Fixed crash condition (no real user has been affected) happening when the user closed a tab while it was loading a big crawl session.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.29.3 Beta (Apr 28, 2015)

New Features:
Full support of BOM (Byte Order Mark) encoding detection. According to most recent specifications, BOM encoding - when present - takes precedence over HTTP header content-type. The software now correctly recognize BOM for UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16 big endian, UTF-32 and UTF-32 big endian for all downloaded content (html pages, xml sitemaps, robots.txt files, etc...)
Other than the character set read (if present) from the HTTP header "content-type", the tool now stores and shows as page properties also the charset read from (if present) the BOM (Byte Order Mark) and meta charset. A page property "Character Set" shows the computed result of the cascade of the following three: "BOM", "Character Set (HTTP)", "Character Set (Meta)".
Performances:
Reduced memory footprint during crawling. It also should be slightly faster in parsing the html, although one might not notice it.
The part that stores crawled pages has been rewritten to be much faster. It already was running in background, so it's easier to notice when crawling more sites in parallel or when quite ahead in crawling large sites.
Minor performance improvement at startup when having to write or read the configuration file the first time. The change is actually a workaround to permit users with un-patched WinXP + .net3.5 using the product, and resulted in a minor speed up.
Another minor improvement at startup makes the software UI respond faster when displaying the Start Page.
Crawling: minor (very little) percentual improvement in performance.
User Experience / Usability:
A progress bar is now shown when deleting a big crawl session takes time and blocks the application UI.
When requesting to upgrade an old project, the project name is shown.
Manage Crawl Sessions form: 'Name' and 'Start URL' columns are wider, so it is easier to read contained values.
Custom filter: ux goodie, expression rows grid unsaved changes are persisted also by pressing the Save button on the toolstrip.
Various:
UI: a new icon to identify VSS both on the desktop and on software forms. People kept telling me the old one was too ugly (yes, I made it by myself) as a desktop icon, and many didn't recognize it represents a chameleon (and not all other kind of reptiles it has been called), so I had one made by a pro. Not sure it conquers me, let's hear the users' feedback.
Now all .dll and .exe files are digitally signed, not only the .msi installer file. This should minimize the chance some antivirus would mistakenly report them as suspicious and block them.
UI: when no character set is specified for a page, the default UTF-8 encoding used is reported in lower-case.
VSS verification: added support to BOM-detected encoding.
Custom Filters UI: if there is no localized string for a queryable property or an expression operator, then the name of the enum value is shown in the combo box.
The tool is now more robust: even if one kills the process during a crawl, the saved data preserves its integrity and can be deleted. No more orphan pages and being unable to remove a forcefully interrupted crawl session.
When removing a crawl session, afterwards the tool will also remove any possible "orphaned" page. Those are now not anymore possible, but could exist in some old crawls.
Fixes:
Fixed real-world crash occurring at startup which prevented quite a number of people with WinXP + .net 3.5 not properly patched to use the product. A workaround now should avoid the problem to occur.
Fixed real world crash occurring when base tag contained multiple slashes. Affected one user, sorry.
Spider/Parser: pages with Character-Set not expressed in HTTP header but in meta tag were treated as UTF-8. This affected a small - but not null - percentage of web sites, where encoding were going bananas. The software now recognizes both "http-equiv" and "charset" (html5) meta tags.
Default encoding for robots.txt, when no BOM nor HTTP header are provided, is now UTF-8. It previously was considered ISO-8859-1 in accordance to RFC2616 (HTTP protocol, section 3.7.1), but that is superseded buy reality (for html we already defaulted to UTF-8, basing on statistical evidence).
HTTP Issues, fixed selectors (errors/warnings) in case of some uncommon status coded.
Crawl/Index/Table Views: fixed colour and icon for some uncommon HTTP status codes.
Fixes crashing condition, which could occur when renaming the last crawled session. No real users have been affected.
Disabled message "Max Depth X exceeded, skipping Y (Referrer is Z)" during crawling, as if met in huge quantity continuously (in same scenarios could happen, especially when X value is low) would make the UI non responsive after a while. Not really a fix yet, just a workaround (proper fix will come soon).
Custom Filters UI: if an expression row already existed and the user created a new row then the operators combo box showed wrong values taken from that existing one.
Custom Filters UI: when switching from a unary queryable property to a binary queryable property the value combo was not enabled/disabled correctly.
Crawling: better robustness against uncommon content-type values in encoding detection.
Custom filters: notation "html/title" fixed as "html/head/title".
UI, grids and property window: when showing URLs (case of broken links) containing new line characters, those were stripped off and one couldn't realize what the problem was. They are now replaced with their textual representation "\r" and "\n".
UI, tree views: when showing URLs (case of broken links) or titles containing new line characters, the node text was unreadable. They are now replaced with their textual representation "\r" and "\n".
Administered Sites form: flickering during the load phase fixed.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.28.1 Beta (Mar 23, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.27.5 Beta (Mar 9, 2015)

NEW FEATURES:
Custom Filters: Added new queryable property "Page Links" with a new set of query operators: "Has links to domain" (nofollow-ed, followed, all) working for generic or exact match domain, and "Has links to external domains" (all, nofollow-ed, followed).
Custom Filters: Added new queryable properties: All heading, and headings count for each H1..H6 title type; "Is part of title" and "Is not part of title" operators operators for all headings.
Custom Filters: Added new queryable properties and query operators: "links to external domains" (all, nofollow-ed, followed), headings H1..H6 count, "Is part of title", "Is not part of title", "Is start of title" and "Is end of title" operators for all headings.
Custom Filters: extended title and H1..H6 headings properties with new operators "Starts with", "Does not start with", "Ends with", "Does not end with".
Custom Filters: queryable properties and operators are now more human-readable and translated in all available languages.
New crawl option: Ignore meta 'nofollow' directives (administered sites only).
New crawl option: Ignore rel="nofollow" attributes (administered sites only).
Administered Sites: added "VSS verification", a new native authentication type you can use for local network sites, or sites you have not GWT/BWT set up. It works by uploading a verification file at the root address of your site. Verification process also supports HTTP Authentication.
USABILITY AND USER EXPERIENCE:
Administered Sites completely revamped:
It is now possible to remove entries, and editing notes feature is easier to spot; icon colums provide a better user experience;
"Verified with" column is more human readable;
"Verified" column is shown with an icon, better understandable;
Credentials verification process takes place on a separate thread, now the UI is no longer blocked if the process takes time;
When the user is waiting for the verification process to complete, a progress bar is shown;
Switching the verification type radio button the right textbox is focused;
Editing is provided also in the Start Page.
UI, several grids: it is now allowed to resize grid columns
Previously not translated technical terms are now translated (Italian language), based on users' feedback'.
ROBUSTNESS:
The spider html parser is now more tolerant against html pages missing the "head" tag, and can find meta data even without it (parse performances are ensured to be the same, though, when an head tag is found).
VARIOUS:
Crawl options: based on user's feedback max crawl dept is set to 15 (previously was 10 levels).
Crawl options: based on user's feedback max courtesy-delay is set to 30 secs (previously was 10 secs).
FIXES:
Fixed real world crash occurred to one user. In same scenarios changing application language since last release could lead to a crash.
Fixed potential crashing condition when closing the Custom Filters window in some corner-case. No real user was ever affected by it.
Page links window: when loading the window with new page data when having at least one of the two filter buttons (internal and external links filter), the content was shown fully, unfiltered, and user had to switch the buttons twice to obtain the desired filtered view.
Some message boxes reporting application errors could under some condition - if a modal dialog was shown and if the user switches with the Windows application bar to it to give it focus - fall behind the modal dialog so that the user could not see it and would find the program unresponsive (it was actually possible to continue using it, but hard to notice).
"ignore Disallow directive" was ignored for start URL (sorry guys!). Thanks to A.P. for reporting it.
HTTP Authentication control logic: in case of "crawl again" with an authentication schema needing username/password (not recalled for security reasons), the related fields were disabled and user had to deselect and select the option again to be able to edit them (nothing terrible, just a usability issue).
Custom filters UI: after switching language the UI, when closing the window the program asked to save even an already saved filter.
Typos fixes (all languages).

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.26.2 Beta (Feb 16, 2015)

New Features:
Crawl options: added optional Accept-Language HTTP header to better emulate new Googlebot behaviour.
HTTP Authentication: full support of Basic, Digest, NTLM and Kerberos HTTP authentication; user can even use the network credentials of the currently logged-in user (e.g. useful for testing withing a local network).
Custom Filters: you can now query crawled pages by TTFB, Fetch time, page size in bytes, page depth (i.e. link depth from the Home Page), and H1..H6 headings content.
"spider trap path", the path to be ignored when crawling a site, is now available for all sites, not only the ones you administer. This was a common request and ignoring a path couldn't harm a site. It might be renamed and extended in the near future.
Usability:
Crawl options, values settable with a numeric up/down control now also show a slider aside to make crystal clear what the range of values permitted is.
Multi-Crawl options, values settable with a numeric up/down control now also show a slider aside to make crystal clear what the range of values permitted is.
Options/Preferences, Suggestions Criteria: values settable with a numeric up/down control now also show a slider aside to make crystal clear what the range of values permitted is.
Options/Preferences, Recent URLs list: values settable with a numeric up/down control now also show a slider aside to make crystal clear what the range of values permitted is.
crawl options, max number of URLs to crawl, incremental steps is 500 (user can always set a value which is not a multiple of 500, of course).
Manage Sessions window, now a right hand pane shows the crawl session details for the current row.
Crawl Options: checkbox "Accept session Cookies" moved under the "Advanced Settings" tab sheet.
Crawl Options: checkbox "Ignore upper/lower case differences in URLs" moved under the "Advanced Settings" tab sheet.
New/Load project window: when a chosen project name is invalid, a proper error message is shown to clarify why the OK button cannot be enabled.
Export to Excel/CSV: after having exported to Excel or CVS, user is asked whether he/she wants to open the exported file. If confirmed, the program attempts to open the file with the associated installed program.
Page Properties: time spans (TTFB and Fetch time) are now represented as milliseconds, as it's unlikely users are interested in hours and minutes.
Tabular View: time spans (TTFB and Fetch time) are now represented as milliseconds, as it's unlikely users are interested in hours and minutes.
Crawl Session window user interface revisited: now is tidier and shows all used crawl parameters in a handy grid.
Performances:
Custom Filters: performance improvements for case when multiple operators require to inspect the HTML.
Application startup is now faster.
Various:
Custom Filters: changed message box default button when asking the user to persist unsaved changes.
Crawl options tabs: text changed to fit tab control available space.
Custom filters UI: Undo/Cancel button text ambiguity resolved (it now reads "Discard changes").
Custom Filters UI: added validation for integer values.
Custom Filters loading: db upgrade logic added.
Start Page, link to "Getting started" web page moved a little right to better fit German translation; made explicit it is in English for the translations which didn't.
If the application cannot load the custom filters database then a message is showed explaining the error.
User-Agent also showed in Session Management and Session Picker windows.
Fixes:
New/Load project form: fixed control logic where it was possible to enable the OK button having an invalid project name (pasted form clipboard) after switching radio buttons to Load Project and then back to New Project. This prevents real world crashing bugs to occur.
Export to Excel: time spans (TTFB and Fetch time) were truncated once exported to Excel (not to CSV). Now the are exported as milliseconds.
Some secondary toolbars and context menus where not updated when switching language.
Typos fixed, all languages.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.25.1 Beta (Feb 2, 2015)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.24.2 Beta (Jan 20, 2015)

New Features:
Project management from Start Page projects grid
Projects can now be renamed or deleted, thanks to two new column buttons Rename and Delete. It was high time.
You can still select a project by clicking on the Open column button, or by double clicking on the row. Thanks to the private beta testers who gave precious feedback about the feature usability.
Rename crawl sessions now permitted.
Page Links window, added columns with Line and Position in line of the link within the HTML code.
Fixes:
Fixed handling of non-common HTTP response codes (some where mistakenly treated as non-crawled pages and listed in the wrong tool window).
Page Links tool window: user-agent used to determined whether (internal) linked resources are blocked by robots.txt is not the one actually used to crawl the site (it was always the default one).
Index View: items order comparison is now case sensitive.
Typos fixes, various languages (thanks to the users who reported them).
Robustness:
Highly reduced memory footprint during crawl of large data sets. The cost is keeping only the first 500 rows of the Output window (I guess not many will notice). When exceeding that limit, top output line is replaced with "..." to suggest more content was there.
Usability:
"Crawl Again.." option from Manage Sessions window, works for both normal and for sitemap crawl sessions. Repeats a crawl using the same crawl options (only session name is not copied to permit differentiating it).
Added page property "URL" with the full URL, both to Properties window and Tabular View (some users were resorting to spreadsheet concatenation to get it once exported, so I decided to spare them the burden).
"Location" page property (referred to the HTTP Header name used in case of 30x redirect) now renamed as "Redirected To" to better convey it's meaning (note: some languages might not reflect the change yet).
"Location" field renamed as "Redirect To" to better convey it's meaning.
Manage Sessions form, added columns (hidden) with all missing crawl parameters.
Property Window, HTTP Status Code field now reported with both the return code number and user-friendly text; support for all known return codes, all over the program.
Session Management window, added "Crawl Type" column.
Session tool window, added "Crawl Type" description.
HTTP Issues window, added "Browse Referrer URL" and "Browse Redirection URL". Users' feedback suggested this would be a time-saver.
Various:
Better graphical support to HTTP status code 418

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.23.1 Beta (Dec 13, 2014)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.22.612 Beta (Dec 2, 2014)

NEW FEATURES:
Full support of X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and bot-specific robots meta tag.
The Program now fully supports the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, both for generic and bot-specific user-agent.
It also support bot-specific meta tag directive (e.g. ).
Since "index" and "follow" directive are received also via generic bot meta directives and HTTP headers, the page Properties window provides two new "Index" and "Follow" boolean fields, showing the combined effect of all different directives.
Custom Filters SEO oriented query engine now uses such combined logic to query, saving users tons of time via the brand new "RobotsDirective" operator.
New Crawl option:
"Ignore upper/lower case differences in URLs" (default is false). URLs are treated by specification as case-sensitive, but there are special cases when an SEO professional might want to ignore casing to focus on other issues. This might happen for example when he/she already assessed internal duplicate content issues due to bad casing in internal links on an IIS web server.
The spider actually has always been able to do it, but the feature was not accessible in public releases.
Customizable 'URL Parameters':
User can now add and remove custom 'URL Parameters' to be ignored when crawling.
Default URL Parameters cannot be deleted and are shown in gray.
URL Parameters are presented for usability reasons in three separate sets: Session IDs, Tracking tags, and Miscellanous.
Customizable File Extensions to skip:
User can now add and remove custom file extensions to be ignored when crawling.
Default Extensions cannot be deleted and are shown in gray.
New URL Suggestions report:
URLs differing in casing only
Helps better spotting internal duplication issues due to wrongly cased URLs in internal links in case of case-insensitive web server (e.g. IIS).
URL Suggestions, report "Duplicate canonical tags" is now split in two: case-sensitive and case-insensitive. This should help diagnostic of case sensitivity issues in the canonical link tag.
FIXES:
Fixed real-world crash occurring in a rare cross-threading condition when loading tabs data asynchronously and updating the related progress bar.
Real-time crawl view: fixed case-sensitivity issue occurring when adding a newly crawled page node; in case a pages with path differing in casing only was already present in the tree view, the new node was not added (but could be seen afterward when loading from session in crawl-view).
Tabular View: fixed case-sensitivity issue occurring when looking up for a page (e.g. selecting a row in the search result window); in case of pages with path differing in casing only, the wrong page could have been selected in the main table.
Custom Filters: under some operators/operands, pages with properties with no value (e.g. no title) were skipped even if actually matching the condition.
Crawl options, default value for URL case-sensitiveness was mistakenly set as "case insensitive", and unfortunately was not customizable (hidden option).
SERP snippet: in some cases WP sites erroneously set sitemaps as text/html content type, and the snippet was shown. Now it makes some more checks to decide whether to show or hide it.
Fixed typo in Russian language (Legend item). Thanks to the anonymous user from Kharkiv who reported it.
Fixed various types in English language.
Load/New Project windows - Fixed minor usability issue: the new project name textbox was not getting the focus.
Load/New Project windows is no longer top most.
USABILITY:
URL Suggestions: added explicit column 'Canonical' in "Duplicate Canonical tag" and "Duplicate Canonical tag (case-insensitive)" reports.
Page Property window: added Index and Follow fields. Their values are the computed taking into account all generic and bot-specific directives via robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers.
VARIOUS:
VisualSEO can now run on any .Net Framework version starting from 3.5 to higher.
It previously required having .Net 3.5 installed and enabled, and prevented some users installing it with ease.
New Setup wizard, re-done from scratch to permit complete support of all .net framework versions (3.5 or greater) and to better comply with UE and Italian Law regulations when asking for EULA acceptance.
Page Links, now showing also the value of the "target" attribute, if present.
Session Window, shown new crawl option: case-sensitiveness applied to visited URLs.
Session Window, shown new crawl option: used user-agent (now that bot specific HTTP and meta directive are supported, one needs to know to what bot they are applied to).
Crawl Sitemap: when a sitemap lists URLs outside its domain, the program previously just skipped them.
Now it presents them as non-crawled items giving a proper explanation.
HTML window now renamed as "Content" (and localized) since it can also show not only HTML content, but also content for robots.txt and sitemap files.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.21.42902 Beta (Nov 10, 2014)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.20.40919 Beta (Sep 22, 2014)

New Features:
Crawl Sitemaps
Permits to crawl all URLs listed in XML Sitemaps. Crawl can start from a normal Sitemap, an Index Sitemap or a robots.txt sitemap directive. In case of robots.txt or Index Sitemap, Sitemap nodes appear nested.
In case some URLs cannot be crawled, they appear listed and are reported as non-crawled along with the reason why they are not.
Compressed sitemap are supported at the moment only if the correct HTTP header is provided. RSS, Atom an text sitemap are not supported yet.
Sitemap Validation Tool
A new validation window is provided for Sitemap resources. It provides super fast and complete validation.
Validations performed are Schema validation (normal sitemap, index sitemap, image sitemap, mobile sitemap, news sitemap, video sitemap, alternate/hreflang extensions), and sitemap protocol specific validation (more than twenty validation rules are checked).
Ability to update old projects to a new format version. Backup of older versions are saved before updating.
Fixes:
Minor fix: better disposal of unused resources (and memory) when closing a tab window.
robots.txt sitemap directive, fix: it accepted a relative path against the specifications.
robots.txt sitemap directive, now if a sitemap url is repeated, it is counted only once.
Export to sitemap: now minimum priority value, if specified, can be 0.1 instead of 0.0 (sitemap protocol accepts 0.0, but some search engines - like Google - don't).
Start page: some text newlines changed to fit available space.
Minor UI fix: during crawling, when no completion data is available, crawl session side window reported a bogus completion date (1 gen 0001). Now when no date is available it shows an empty string.
Some fixed dialog windows had minimize/maximize buttons, now hidden.
Performances:
DOM window content is now refreshed only when the tab is selected, improving UI responsiveness in all other cases.
HTML window content is now refreshed only when the tab is selected, improving UI responsiveness in all other cases.
Various:
"Crawl a Site" dialog window, added title icon to make it uniform to the other dialogs.
All crawl parameters now persisted (even if they might not be shown in the UI).

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.19.4832 Beta (Jun 25, 2014)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.18.41731 Beta (Jun 24, 2014)

New Features:
Screenshot taker: now you can stop loading, reload, and optionally specify desired screen resolution.
Crawl options: implemented "Ignore robots.txt Disallow directives", where one can specify an optional "Spider Trap" path to exclude.
robots.txt syntax: support for Allow directives.
robots.txt syntax: support for $ wildcard in Disallow directives.
robots.txt syntax: support for * wildcard in Disallow directives.
Fixes:
Screenshot taker, fixed all known issues causing real world crashes.
Fixed real-world crash occurring when saving screenshot for some pages.
Fixed real world crash. When loading a crawl session, apparently a progress bar received a change event before it had a window handle ready. An extremely rare event, only two users experienced it in two single instances.
robots.txt syntax, querystring were not evaluated when matching Disallow directives.
Localized texts installed for graph component for supported languages (Polish is missing, unfortunately).
Usability:
Views, when clicking on a page node and Session side tab is selected, Page Properties side tab will be selected.
Shot Taker, if the original URL fetched is redirected, the new URL is shown, in blue (but the saved image is associated to the original URL).
Various:
robots.txt syntax - matched Googlebot behaviour (and specs) for case out of original specs: if the value in the directive is missing a leading slash, it is now interpreted as if there it was (e.g. fish/ is equivalent to /fish/)
robots.txt syntax - matched Googlebot behaviour (and specs) for case out of original specs: when Disallow value is only * wildcard (supported from this release), it is considered equivalent to /*
HTML/URI/GA Suggestions: now when a description doesn't fit the available space, it is shown truncated with an ellipses, and it's full content can be seen with a tooltip.
Translations updated and fixed for all languages; UI controls resized to fit them where needed.
Minor changes to main menu items (ellipses, all languages)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.17.31691 Beta (Jun 2, 2014)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.16.21093 Beta (May 26, 2014)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.15.38677 Beta (May 7, 2014)

New Features:
Non-crawlable URLs (e.g. URLs blocked by robots.txt) now persisted.
Added new "Non Crawled items" tool window to visualize them
SERP snippet - after one month Google updated again its layout so that now title words are again preserved entirely; this release copes with the change
Fixes:
Fixes real world crash caused by badly formed IDN link. Now the badly-formed link is just ignored and skipped (in future might be reported in Page Links tool)
Fixes real world crash happened to a user checking for updates while the back-end server probably stopped working. A very rare corner-case, but very improbable corner case issues do happen in real world.
Fixed real world crash when saving an XML Sitemap in case of access denied to the selected path
Fixed theoretical crash condition: export to Excel (an .csv as well) crashed in case of access denied to the selected path. No real users were harmed to fix this issue.
Fixed minor UI issue when switching language: localized grid content wasn't refreshed straight away.
Create sitemap: fixed counter of session http requests (used to show the exportable pages count)
SERP snippet, minor UI fix: now paths with https schema show the http:// schema as Google does (thanks to the user who reported the issue)
SERP Snippet: ampersand symbols in title were not shown (thanks to the user who reported the issue)
Minor UI fix: now correctly associating icon and color to OK-like HTTP status: "201 Created" and "202 Accepts"; very corner-case (they already were correctly handled in crawling, this is just a UI fix)
Robustness:
Improved memory consumption detection during crawling, nearly halving the chances to incur in an out-of-memory exception
Maximum URL number to explore temporarily reduced to a safer 75.000
Usability:
Added legend to help understand colors and icons
Custom Filters, case-sensitive checkbox enlarged to give space to all translations
Session Viewer tool - moved most of the session related info aside.
Views, thanks to the new Session Viewer side panel, the main panel is now much less cluttered. Start URL is now shown.
Start URL shown in session header UI (as well as total items, now that also non crawled items are included).
Various:
Installer: added personalized banner image
Custom Filters, changed Italian translation for "case sensitive"

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.14.35130 Beta (Mar 26, 2014)

New Features:
Support for Polish language in user interface
Crawl Ajax sites.
Ajax sites supporting the specifications for crawlable Ajax (e.g. WIX sites) can now be visited.
The integration is seamless all over the program and all pretty URLs with ajax hashbang fragments are reported as part of the URL path throughout the program.
The features makes Visual SEO Studio one of the very few (if any) SEO software to permit auditing an ajax based web site.
Page Links window now also shows the value of the title attribute.
Fixes:
Fetch of text/plain resources wasn't completed when the content type also specified an encoding. This was particularly unfortunate in case of robots.txt files which resulted empty.
Fixed typos in Spanish translation (Propiedad/Propiedades).
Thanks to the Spanish user who reported the faulty translations.
Minor fixes in various texts (all languages)
Robustness:
Available-Memory checkpoints
Now crawler during spidering tries its best to check in advance whether there is enough free memory to continue with the crawl session.
If it understands there's not enough, it stops the crawl session and invites closing other programs.
In case of non-recoverable crash the app needs to terminate itself, but in some instances it failed to do it leaving the state unstable. Especially true in the case of out-of-memory crashes, not treated in a smarter way (better handled, and when they occur the app tries also to compact a little the memory before asking the user to report the unexpected crash).
Usability:
In tool windows (e.g HTTP Issues, Find Results, ...) now status of robots.txt file nodes (ok/error/warning) changes the used logic.
Not found is now considered just a warning, not an error (a missing robots.txt file is perfectly valid), while a redirection is now considered an error, not a warning (a redirected robots.txt file is invalid even if tolerated by same search engines).
Views, now robots.txt nodes/rows are represented with a specialized icon dedicated to represent a robots.txt file, and their text color is red for redirects and blue for not found (a missing robots.txt file is perfectly valid, just needs a warning, while a redirected robots.txt file is invalid even if tolerated by same search engines)
Administered Sites: OK button renamed as Close, it better describes its function
Various:
Simulated Crawl Delay, updated minimum possible value according to what Googlebot can recently do.
FIXed casing of second Russian contributor name (sorry Ilya)
SERP snippet: layout updated with latest Google SERP layout of March 2014; improved precision in calculating truncation points (both on title and meta-description); optimized system resources usage.
HTML Suggestions: Truncated titles report updated with new title size after latest Google SERP layout of March 2014; improved precision in calculating truncation points (both on Truncated Titles and Truncated meta-descriptions reports); optimized system resources usage.
URL Suggestions, main grid resized to better fit Russian (and now Polish) header translations.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.13.26351 Beta (Feb 17, 2014)

New Features:
Support for Russian language in user interface
Options, URL and HTML Suggestion threshold criteria values are now configurable.
"Crawl Outside Of Start Folder" option. Feature is by default a "navigate all". Permits to optionally restrict crawling to a single sub-folder when start URL is a deep link withing said sub-folder.
User Agent switcher, added support to Google Smartphone (new agent) and mobile crawlers.
Fixes:
Fixed real world crash. It occurred when clicking on the 'X' on the last tab and very rapidly moving out of the tabs banner. It's a "corner-case" and I struggled to reproduce it using two hands with several attempts, nevertheless it occurred to several users
Fixed real-world crash (one user affected) when crawling a page having a Canonical URL not crawled yet and containing a double // slash.
Fix/Robustness - Create sitemap, radio buttons "export by crawl-order/alphabetical-order" suffered occasionally a control logic issue due to the buggy platform control and appeared both selected. I overridden the control logic to work it around (Thanks to the user who reported the problem).
Minor UI issue: robots.txt viewer, icon column in grid had a non significant text ("colIcon")
Simulated Crawl Rate: Fixed Italian and Spanish translations (they had translations for "Low" and "High" inverted)
Usability:
Administered Sites: OK button renamed as Close, it better describes its function
"Crawl a Site" form: start URL field is now the active field when the dialog pops up.
Administered Sites, added Expire column and red colouring for expired sites
Start Page (Administered Sites section), added Expire column and red colouring for expired sites
Options, Suggestions criteria. While appearing disabled, the values could be changed but not persisted, and this puzzled a few users. Now the usability issue is removed as criteria are now customizable (see new feature).
Various:
Text fixes in various languages, especially Spanish (thanks to the users who reported the mistakes)
Simulated Crawl Delay, updated minimum possible value according to what Googlebot can recently do.
Check for updates (and other back-end requests) timeout is now reduced to 15s. It was 1' and when the back-end server was overloaded it froze for too long the initial splash window (check for updates is performed every time the program is launched)
About box, Credits, added Russian Translators

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.12.42523 Beta (Jan 14, 2014)

New Features:
Multi-site parallel crawling:
Visual SEO Studio has always been able to perform parallel, now it makes easier to launch the spiders at the same time. Useful for competitors analysis and hunting prospective customers of SEO agencies.
Fixes:
Fixed real world crash condition when deleting an entry in Custom Filters after the grid changed focus. 6 real users suffered it, sorry guys. Thanks to the one who told me how to reproduce it.
Fix - when closing main form with a running crawl, start page and manage sessions form where forced closed (correctly), then the running crawl impeded closing, but the two previous windows couldn't open any more.
Robustness - Custom Filters Editor, prevented (a very) theoretical crashing condition. No user could possibly have ever experienced it.
Performances:
Asynchronous storage:
Saving crawl data on disk has been completely decoupled from the crawl process, using an asynchronous queue consumed by a dedicated thread delegated to save data in background. The end result is doubling the crawl speed in case of highly responsive web sites, without losing crawl path visualization or overloading the web server.
Asynchronous UI crawl events
Updating the User Interface has been decoupled from the crawl process, squeezing some more performances in crawl speed and overall making the UI more responsive.
Crawl/Index/Tabular View: UI responsiveness after clicking on a page node is now 8-9 time faster
Usability:
Tabs close icon
Tabs now show an 'X' icon when hovered sensitive to mouse click, permitting to quickly close the current Tab without having to resort to the far right 'X'.
Tabs context menu
Tabs now sport a context menu permitting quickly perform closure actions (Close, Close All But This, Close All)
When closing the main form and there was a crawl in progress, the program didn't close without feedback. Now it gives a proper message and activates the tab preventing closure.
Various:
Framework library DockPanes Suite updated to latest version
Start Page, minor fix: updated first sentence explaining Administered Sites to reflect new behaviour.
"Crawl a Site" form: added column after text labels to comply to usability conventions
English Translation, fixed typos

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.11.1175 Beta (Dec 10, 2013)

Fixes:
Fixed real world crash occurred with the weirdest URL I have ever seen, which caused URL Suggestions to crash. Thanks to the user who provided the culprit URL domain.
Fixed real-world crash on Html suggestions for the weirdest URL I have ever seen.
Fixed (rare) threading issue with DB access. At least in two real-world cases it caused a crash to an end user.
Robustness - Fixed issues with non-responsive UI in presence of very large crawl data, when closing a tab gave the impression of having the application hang.
Robustness - Fixed issues with non-responsive UI in presence of very large crawl data, when closing a tab gave the impression of having the application hang.
Robustness: application much more robust against rare corner-case threading issues when closing tabs during the load phase.
Crawling, fixed canonical computation of relative canonical tags in presence of base tag (both rare, and the combination is a corner case, but base should be used to compute any relative URL when available, not only normal links).
Authentication via BWT, improved error message.
Fixed localization issue: authentication via BWT API did set user interface culture to English.
User agent spoofing, fixed user-agent string text for implemented bots (added missing slash).
Localization - "Title" was not localizable in Properties Windows and HTML Suggestions.
English Localization: fixed typos.
Robustness: application much more robust against rare corner-case threading issues when closing tabs during the load phase.
Robustness - Any unexpected error occurring when saving a screenshot now doesn't force the application to close after submitting a crash report, it simply closes the dialog. Improved diagnostic should ease reproducing and fixing the underlying bug.
Robustness - Any unexpected error occurring when computing HTML/URL/GA Suggestion now doesn't force the application to close after submitting a crash report, it simply aborts computation (you might still see the progress running). Improved diagnostic should ease reproducing and fixing the underlying bug.
Robustness - Session picker allowed picking a still-running crawl sessions for inspection, which subsequently could generate inconsistent states and weird errors and apparent application hanging (actually sloooowly recovering). Now still-running crawl session are discarded from the session list (e.g. when launching Html/URL/GA Suggestions)
Start new project dialog: fixed minor control logic issues
URL suggestions, "Too many tokens" report: minor corrections and stability fixes.
Usability:
Start new project dialog: First time usage, project name pre-filled as "My First Project" (localized), and is pre-selected.
Tabular View, now when the view is used to show all crawl session data it does not show the "subset" field with value "none" (non localized). It actually wasn't meant to show it in the first place; the field is shown only when opening in Tabular View a subset from a Suggestion report or a Custom Filter.
Language switcher: now current language item is not shown as disabled, but with a tick mark aside.
SERP snippet, title link is now actually a link to the browse the page.
Various:
Crawling: now canonical paths of crawled pages are added to the crawl queue if yet unexplored. This might be a source to find non-linked URLs (or could lead to canonical encoding issues, even if already traceable by other means)
user-agent spoofing, added AdsBot-Google, Seznambot, Baiduspider
URL suggestions, removed notation "Experimental" for "Too many tokens" report, after corrections and stability fixes.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.10.39980 Beta (Oct 28, 2013)

New Features:
Courtesy delay not set if no crawl-delay was found in robots.txt
The change allows to crawl at full-speed in the majority of cases, even for non-administered web sites (being the crawler speed adaptive to the server response, there is no risk to overload the web site).
Max crawl-delay set to 2 secs (used only if crawl-delay directive is specified).
This limit was lowered from the previous 10 secs value after considering the old one was hypothesized many years ago when bandwidth was much scarcer (today even normal browsers tend to consume much more).
Spoof User-Agent option (administered sites only).
Today the list of available user agents is limited; it will expand very soon. Keep in mind only the user agent used to decorate the HTTP requests changes (and the obeyed user-agent directive in robots.txt file), still the crawler is not able to adopt the parsing rules of the different search engines.
Crawl option: skip sub domains (thanks to Erik v.E. who suggested it)
Spanish language support.
Thank to Mauro Larosa and Silvano Parodi for the translation work. For any translation mistake, I am the one to be blamed - especially for the last-minute corrections - as I double checked every single word notwithstanding my little Spanish.
The translation is released as experimental to give the chance to Spanish-speaking users to contribute with their corrections.
This is the third non-English language supported after Italian and German. Other will come soon.
Fixes:
Real world Crash condition Fixed. This is the longest standing crash condition by far, and affected about 3% of the user base when launching the program when an instance was already running. The program is single instance and normally handle the case smoothly passing the context to the already running instance, but in some cases the application could not connect to the original instance (similar case to another more rare issue) due to missing privileges. This fix handles the case with a tailored warning message with proper instructions.
Fixed start-up crash condition: the program is single instance and normally when an instance is already running a subsequent application launch silently terminate switching context to the existing instance, but in some rare cases when the first instance cannot be contacted the program crashed. This crash is very similar to the other fixed in the same release, but much rarer: so far only two users were affected by this one.
Real world crash fixed. When a malformed HTTP header declared a GZip (or any other) compression, and no such compression was provided, the crawl process stopped with an unexpected error to be reported to the author. OK, seen and fixed. Now the process continues, a red icon is provided for the page (with status code forced to Unused - this will change in the future), the issue is shown as a Warning, and the unexpected error detail is logged in the (volatile, sorry) output window. For the future, the exception will be recorded in stored data.
Administered Sites verification via Bing Webmaster Tools API Key was broken due to changes to the API interface. Now is working again (thanks Erik v.E. for reporting the issue).
Custom Filters, robustness against occasional radio buttons glitches (theoretical only).
Administered sites, robustness against occasional radio buttons glitches (happened to a private beta tester).
HTML Suggestion - minor localization issue fixed: the criteria textbox content obeyed the current OS language and not the one set from the menu option (they normally are the same so not many users are likely to have realized it).
Minor FIX: in some hypothetical conditions a crash condition might terminate the program without notifying the problem (it probably never occurred in real world).
Several fixes in Italian and German translations.
Usability:
"Crawl a Site" form revisited
The layout has been completely rearranged to make it simpler, fitting all the advanced options in dedicated tabs, to permit the user not to bother in the majority of cases and just concentrate in the most important one (the Start URL).
Various:
Crawler user-agent version updated to reflect new changes. Arbitrarily set to 0.5 (was 0.1)
About box, updated credits (translators and components)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.9.42010 Beta (Sep 17, 2013)

New Features:
Translation to German
Kudos to Jörg Barth for his patient work on iteratively translating and testing the German version.
This is the second non-English language supported after Italian. Other will come soon.
Fixes:
BUG FIX / Workaround - Internationalization - According to HTTP specs, when no character set is specified, ISO-8859-1 should be considered the default, and that's what the spider did. Unfortunately this choice is rarely correct.
HTML specs suggest to parse the meta http-equiv="Content-Type" tag; it would be a big overhead, it might be done in the future.
At the moment, the following heuristic is now applied: use UTF-8 when character set is not specified in the HTTP header (it is 6.4 times more likely to be correct, and only a minor - and always decreasing - percentage of times it would be wrong). Not perfect, but a much, much better improvement.
BUG FIX / Workaround - FIXED (hopefully) real world crash - Persisting the config file needed (due to the used underling libraries inner working) handling a temporary file at least the first time. For two distinct users this resulted in an access denied to temporary folder with subsequent error. Code has been changed to avoid the need of a temporary file.
FIX / Workaround - a user experienced a crash while sorting a grid column (which one, I don't know). I've not been able to find the root cause and reproduce the error, but made the code robust against such an unexpected case.
BUG FIX - real world crash prevented: copying in Clipboard caused a crash to a users, who had the Clipboard in use by another process. Handled with proper warning and explanation.
Fixed theoretical crash condition: export to XML Sitemap crashed when exporting over an existing file already in use by another program locking it (e.g. MS Excel, unlikely; programs like notepad or IE don't lock the file). No real users were harmed to fix this issue.
Fixed crash condition: export to Excel (an .csv as well) crashed when exporting over an existing file already in use by another program (e.g. MS Excel). Two users did experience it.
Fixed minor UI localization issue: "Checking for updates.." message was always in English, despite language set being different
FIX - Output window during crawling showed messages in the language set in Windows, not set by the language switcher (they usually are the same so not many should have been bothered)
Minor UI fix - HTTP issues, fixed size of Error/Warning buttons to better fit Italian translation
Translation: added missing Italian translation (the warning when no Crawl sessions are available)
Fixed UI control dimensions to better fit non-English translations
Usability:
Suggestion trees, first column instead of "duplicated value" is named with the actual name of the duplicated property
Launch Pad: added tooltips for when the link text doesn't fit
Insert URL dialog (for screenshot taking): inverted position of OK and Cancel buttons (and tab order) to comply with Windows UI conventions
Various:
URL Suggestions, uniformed tabs padding
About Box: credits text added
GA suggestions: minor UI improvement (fist tab padding set like the others)
Session Management: minor UI improvement
FIXed typos everywhere (Italian & English)
Revisited many UI control dimensions and positions to better fit non-English translations

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.8.1389 Beta (Jul 29, 2013)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.7.39762 Beta (Jun 13, 2013)

New Features:
Added "GA Suggestions", a complete, fully-automated test suite able to detect the most common issues with mis-configured setups of Google Analitycs® code.
Please notice the feature is probably unique in Visual SEO Studio, at least is not present in the most known competitor products.
Added "Custom Filters", a powerful and intuitive query engine to perform any kind of customized filtering over crawled pages data via a simple user interface.
The feature is still experimental and incomplete (load/save filters are disabled, and there is some minor quirkiness in the UI interface), nevertheless the engine is ready for use and performs fast enough.
URL Suggestions, added new report "Too many tokens", listing pages with URLs that, if used as anchor texts in links, would be tokenized with to many tokens (Google seems to store only the fist 8 tokens of anchor texts).
Note: the feature is marked as "experimental" (needs more research on the actual Google behaviour).
Fixes:
Sitemap: fixed long standing crash condition, occurred when no exportable pages were available to load on the tree view. Sorry for not fixing any sooner, available diagnostics was too little. Thanks to the user who reported the error with a contact e-mail letting me get more details about it!
New project dialog: prevented crash condition (occurred to one user) in case invalid file name chars were entered (it already performed a check, but pasting text in some instances could work around the safety net).
Fixed hypothetical crashing condition. No real user was ever harmed to fix it.
Some Unicode domain names (couldn't get the exact issue) caused a crash parsing. Worked around keeping them in the punyCoded version when the issue arises to play it safe.
Crawling, fixed interpretation of URLs starting with // (at the beginning of the link means "use the same scheme/protocol", only the subsequent occurrences have to be normalized with single /).
XML Sitemaps, fixed specs adherence in case of IDN domains - XML Sitemaps generator, now URLs are always URL-encoded; Internationalized Domain Names are always puny-coded.
URL Suggestions, Encoded URLs grid didn't have context menu.
Index View - clicking on an URL-encoded item on HTTP issues or Search result didn't select the node in the tree view.
Usability:
Usability - added progress bar to show elaboration progress (mainly due to load from db), with textual percentage. It still doesn't differentiate the tasks of loading data from the database and elaborating the data (will do it very soon), yet it greatly improves usability giving clues something is actually happening and hinting how long it will take.
Various:
Suggestion grids: added SERP snippet previews, UI revisited, minor fixes/tweaks.
Various - robots.txt viewer, added temporary icon.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.6.13096 Beta (May 2, 2013)

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.5.42940 Beta (Apr 6, 2013)

Features:
Full support of URL decoding of all Unicode characters shown in paths.
The program has always correctly displayed Unicode characters, but what if they are URL-encoded in the URL?
While for several western countries it is considered a best practice limiting URL characters to a restricted set (e.g. avoiding accents on vowels in the URL), for may other cultures not only the rule might not apply, it is common practice. Showing the original encoded URL in most view would make them very hard to use.
This release makes a huge step towards these users who have to deal with Cyrillic, Arab, Hebrew, Persian, Japanese, etc... in the URLs.
Please notice the feature is probably unique in Visual SEO Studio, at least is not present in the most known competitor products.
The URL decoding support is added throughout the whole application: all URL related properties (Path, Location, Canonical, Referrer, HREFs...) are shown both in the original and URL-decoded version, using the URL-decoded (and human readable) as preferred one for all the views where user has quickly spot what the pages are about.
Changes:
Tabular View, added URL decoded versions of Canonical Path and Referrer;
Find Pages Dialog - now searching also decoded URL paths (performance wise)
XML sitemap editor now shows paths url-decoded, to make it usable for many non-western cultures as well
URL Suggestions, duplicated canonical now url-decoded
Referrer Path shown url-decoded
HTTP issues, now also the Location path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
URL suggestions, Canonical Path shown url-decoded
URL Suggestions grids, added Path Encoded column
Suggestion Trees (HTML and URL suggestions), now the grouped pages path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
Sorting is performed accordingly using the URL decoded text
Page Links, now the internal path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
Tabular View, Find Results and HTTP issues, now the path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
Index View, Crawl View, now the path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
SERP snippet, now the path is shown with an URL-decode to correctly represent all Unicode characters
Others:
HTML Suggestions, added reports "Duplicated titles (canonical)" and "Duplicated meta-descriptions (canonical)". It can make perfect sense having duped pages if one has canonical pointing to the other (happens often in e-commerce sites).
The new logic returns totals better resembling the incomplete reports you can find on GWT.
The old "Duplicated titles" and "Duplicated meta-description" are kept for comparison for a while, but might be dropped soon (and the new report will take the old names); I'm waiting for users feedback on this.
Fixes:
Fixed real world crash - user launched long crawl on Friday night; PC went in suspend mode while fetching an HTTP stream; on Monday when PC resumed, the program attempted to read the stream and crashed. Now it does not crash and can continue crawling (but the page is lost)
Robustness - minor change to better handle case of tabs closed before the asynchronous data computation were completed. This should hopefully FIX a real world crash experienced by three users
Fixed crash condition in HTML Suggestions if user closed the tab before the data was ready and shown. It never occurred in the wild, so no beta tester has been harmed to fix this issue :)
Crawl and Index views - FIXed performance issue on loading/expanding huge trees
Session grids, minor UI issue: when switching project, session lists were reloaded in ascending order
Fixed error in detecting pages with canonical path different from crawled one in some cases where there is a query-string
HtmlSuggestionsForm, minor UI fixes in new report tabs
Usability:
Crawl Options, default crawl-delay shown as 10s (instead of 1.0) when no "override crawl-delay" option is selected, to avoid create false expectations; when selected, it automatically is set to 0.0s (the most common choice), but one can of course change it.
Interactive Crawl: now progress bar adjusts it's maximum based on the queued elements (so it might vary over time) keeping the set max number of pages to visit as top limit. Before the program used such value as progress bar maximum, but did not mean much if the number of visitable pages - unknown a-priori - was (much) smaller.
Interactive Crawl, now the progress bar shows a text with the current value, maximum and percentage
HTML and URL Suggestions: added a break down of analyzed pages
Tabular View: now rows are coloured using the same visual clues used for on the Tree Views (crawl and index view)
Crawl and Index View: non-canonical URLs evidenced in green
Start Page: current project pre-selected in projects list
Sessions Management - now all commands available via context menu are also available via a visible toolbar; added button to perform a new crawl; changed explanatory text
Session picker, added columns ID (fixed) and number of visited pages
Session grids, now new sessions are always added at the top of the grids
Property grid, user-friendly property names (not using the db column names)
HTML suggestions, report "Duplicated Meta-Description tags": evidenced page titles
HTML suggestions, now for Duplicated title and meta-description, canonical path is shown instead of pseudo-Referrer
Usability issue fixed - Create Sitemap, changing checked state of a tree node made the top node to be selected; this was particularly annoying when working on nodes at the bottom of a huge tree
Various:
Tabular View, minor changes: renamed headers to "Crawl depth" and "Crawl progressive"
Robots.txt viewer - added comment box to explain the feature is still under development and there will be much more to come
URL suggestions, report "Duplicated Canonical tags", evidenced page titles (instead of pseudo-referrer)
Html Suggestions - char-long titles and meta-descriptions reports moved in order. They do not really tell you the picture, user should rely on the pixel width based reports (Truncated Title and Truncated meta-descriptions)
SERP item - adapted to new SERP layout (path font is now 14px, spacing slightly changed)
URL suggestions - "Pages with weird characters" renamed as "Pages with Encoded characters", because that's what it is. While it's not a "best" practice for languages as Italian or Spanish, in many non-western cultures it's at least "common" practice, and saying "weird" sounded disrespectful.

New in Visual SEO Studio 0.8.4.1001 Beta (Mar 6, 2013)

Features:
Screenshots miniature viewer: Save screenshot and Copy screenshot to clipboard implemented.
You might even call it a fix, since I simply forgot it wasn't there (sorry guys/gals).
Find Pages dialog: added "Search in HTML" option (by default un-selected).
URL Suggestions, added report "Canonical not matching Path (Casing only)" for IIS based systems.
"Give some feedback" option. Permits sending feature requests, report a bug, or make a suggestion to the author directly within the application.
Sitemap Editor: added checkbox to skip pages whose Canonical URL is different from crawled URL (default is checked). The feature was suggested by a beta tester (thank you J.).
If difference is in casing only, URL is not skipped (in case was due to wrong internal link in IIS served pages).
Fixes:
FIX of threading issue supposedly responsible of a real world crash submitted by a beta tester (thank you J!). The crash could have occasionally occurred when switching between title and path view during the crawling process.
HTML and URL suggestions: fixed crash caused by colons (:) in URL paths (invalid in Windows, but used in Unix, though probably not in RFC).
The bug was uncovered internally, no beta tester users were harmed for the fix.
Fixed crash condition on application closing (never happened to users, no beta tester were harmed for the fix).
URL suggestions report didn't take into account (sub)domain, so that - for example - root pages with same path but on different sub-domains where listed as dupes.
Find Pages dialog, minor UI fix.
Usability:
HTML and URL suggestions: added Summary tabs, and link "Show summary".
Start Page now is not closed when loading another project, but updates itself.
Start Page, added list of Crawl Sessions for the loaded project.
On change loaded project now Sessions Management view is not closed, just updates its data.
When choosing a menu option needing to pick a crawl session, if no session were available an empty picker was shown; now a proper warning box appears giving also the chance to launch a new crawl session.
The unexpected error window now accepts tabs in description text.
Crawl Session Management: added explanation label; other minor UI improvements.
Various:
Splash: product version with fourth field as in about box.
Find dialog, option "Search in URL" restated as "Search in URL path" (because that's what it does).
Find Pages dialog: stubbed "Search in Page Text" (disabled, still unavailable).