Wine 1.4 Nears Release: Code Freeze, 1.4-rc1

Phoronix has been reporting for a while a now that it looks like Wine 1.4 would be released by April of 2012. This looks like it will all pan out with Wine 1.4 now entering a code freeze and 1.4-rc1 was released this Friday rather than a Wine 1.3 development point release.

Replacing the bi-weekly Wine 1.3 development point release is now the release candidates for Wine 1.4. As of now, Wine is under a code freeze period to ready this major release; it's been nearly two years since Wine 1.2 was released in July of 2010.

As far as what's new since the Wine 1.3.37 release two weeks ago, there is:

- Improved crash dialog with support for saving the backtrace.
- Support for the Back button in built-in Internet Explorer.
- Keyboard accelerators can now be translated through po files.
- A number of installer fixes.
- Many translation updates and tweaks.
- Various bug fixes.

There are the release notes on WineHQ.org for those interested in 1.4-rc1. As said on that page, "Please give this release a good testing to help us make 1.4 as good as possible."

With Wine 1.4 being the first major release in two years, there's a hell of a lot of changes to look forward to with this next stable version. Among the changes are better Shader Model 4.0 support, some ARM support, lots of fixes, an OpenCL wrapper, DOSBox integration, browser updates, X Input 2 support, better Direct3D 9.0 support, a better Internet Explorer, faster performance, JavaScript improvements, and the DIB engine, among many other improvements and at least hundreds of bug-fixes.

When Wine 1.4 is officially available, CodeWeavers will release CrossOver 11 (along with their CrossOver Games edition).