GNOME 3.3.3 Heats Things Up For GNOME 3.4

GNOME 3.3.3 is now available as the latest update in what will ultimately become GNOME 3.4 next March.

GNOME 3.3.3 was announced on Friday, 23 December, but only this morning did the release announcement clear GNOME's mailing list queue.

There's a lot heating up for GNOME 3.4, but some of the changes in particular for GNOME 3.3.3 that caught my attention when running through the change-logs are listed below.

- A lot of the Empathy messenger program code has been re-factored.

- The invasive Epiphany web-browser changes have landed affecting tabs, the home-page, no more bookmarks/topics bar, etc.

- GLib now has experimental menu support to GApplication. "Menus are exported on the bus, alongside the actions that are already there. There have also been many related improvements to action group functionality."

Will GNOME 3.4 be as hot as Heiße Caipi or will people continue to be upset over the GNOME3 changes?

- The GNOME Control Center has better graphics, visual improvements, and "Many improvements that I can't really summarize here."

- Per-device and per-stylus settings are now supported by GNOME Settings Daemon 3.3.3 (mostly for Wacom devices). X Input 2 is now required to build gnome-settings-daemon.

- A new GNOME Boxes release for virtual machine management in a simpler way than virt-manager.

- Gnomine, Gnotravex, and lightsoff of GNOME Games have been ported to Vala.

- The Totem movie player now uses the new GLib threading API when building against supportive GLib versions.

Some of the other changes planned for GNOME 3.4 are mentioned on the GNOME Live Wiki page.