I’ve made some cosmetic changes to SearchMash, so that you don’t just see a blank screen while it’s loading. You now see “Loading…” in the results frame, and a quick primer on how to use SearchMash in the preview. The primer is there because I had a lot of feedback that the initial screen was confusing to first-time users, since it’s just the google start page in a frame. Hopefully the extra information should make it easier to get started.

I also worked on the problem with the preview window sometimes causing script errors in IE, filed as Preview window can stop working after changing pages and Previewing missing sites on IE stops window in Sourceforge’s bug tracker. I added a try/catch around the access to the preview frame’s document, and tried to reset security by setting it back to the original local ‘src’ if there was an exception. I still see the exception occuring (I’m using MS’s very handy script debugger, which I’ll cover soon), but I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem with the window getting stuck, I hope my changes will unwedge it if it’s in that state.