CrossOver 11 Is Coming, Based On Wine 1.4

CodeWeavers is now working towards CrossOver 11.0 as the next major version of their Office and Gaming products that allow popular Windows software to run unmodified under Linux and Mac OS X platforms. CrossOver 11 will be based upon the Wine 1.4 release and is expected for release in just a few months.

CodeWeavers blasted off an email today to their customers to inform them of last week's release of CrossOver Games 10.3, which was publicly released last week. CrossOver Games added in support for Skyrim, World of Warcraft bug-fixes, and various other new supported titles. What was more interesting than just mentioning minor CrossOver updates is instead the major updates that are about to come.

Jeremy White, the CEO of CodeWeavers, confirmed that they and the Wine community are indeed nearing the version 1.4 release of Wine. CodeWeavers plans to release CrossOver 11 and CrossOver Games 11 in tandem with the Wine 1.4 stable release. "We have been hard at work on Wine and I am pleased to say that Wine is now driving towards a stable 1.4 release. We will be incorporating all of that goodness into CrossOver 11 so that we can release simultaneously with Wine 1.4, most likely in March," said White.

In terms of the upstream Wine 1.4 improvements, "The work we have poured into Wine this past year has been incredible; we have implemented a DIB engine which should speed up a wide range of applications, made major improvements to audio, improved language support dramatically, and have made major improvements to Wine's D3D engine among many, many other improvements. I am very eager to bring you CrossOver 11 - I think it will be a great step forward for all of our customers."

As an original innovation on the CrossOver 11 side will be automatic update notifications. "CrossOver 11 will also incorporate automatic update notification to make it easier for you to upgrade and to learn about upgrades. This will hopefully prevent a repeat of this oversight on my part in the future."

Back in October I talked about the Wine 1.4 release criteria and some of the changes it will hold in store. The Wine 1.3 development series has seen many changes from major advancements to the DIB engine, better JavaScript handling, DirectDraw/OpenGL enhancements, a better built-in browser, and greater Direct3D 9.0 support (including multi-sampling).

An official release schedule has yet to come for Wine 1.4, but it's widely believed it will come in March or April of this year. Wine 1.2, the last major (stable) update for Wine, arrived in July of 2010.