The First GNOME 3.8 Development Release

The first development release of the GNOME 3.8 is now available with new features for the GNOME desktop.

GNOME 3.7.1 represents the first development milestone towards GNOME 3.8, which is expected to be released in March of 2013. The GNOME 3.7.1 release came this morning and among the features to the included packages include:

- Many new small features and enhancements to the GNOME Control Center.

- OAuth 2.0 support for Google within the GNOME Online Accounts component. The gnome-online-accounts package also now supports ownCloud and Flickr.

- The GNOME Settings Daemon is now dependent upon logind for session tracking as well as suspending and rebooting the system.

- The Epiphany web-browser no longer allows you to disable JavaScript from the user-interface with the reasoning that JS is so widespread and dependent for most web-sites. "Remove JavaScript preference from the UI. Pretty much every single page the average user visits needs JavaScript, so this is a "Please break my web" preference in disguise. For those concerned about security and/or privacy the GSetting remains available."

- Various changes to the GNOME Shell, although none of the listed items seem to be extremely notable.

- GStreamer 1.0.2 has been pulled into GNOME 3.7.1.

- GTK+ 3.7.0 updates for the latest Wayland protocol/API changes found in Wayland 1.0.

- The Nautilus file manager has re-enabled recursive search for the simple engine, supports incremental loading for search directories, improved image properties reporting, and fixes various crashing bugs.

The GNOME 3.7.1 release announcement can be found on the GNOME mailing list.