14 DAY TRIAL // The first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is upon us, currently scheduled to land today, August 9, 2017, but most probably will be delayed a day or two as not all components have been released.
During the first days of this week, the GNOME devs were pretty busy updating their apps and libraries for the GNOME 3.26 Beta release, and the maintainers of the Epiphany web browser already published the source tarball of Epiphany 3.26 Beta to enabled Firefox Sync by default.
The maintainers did a great job on improving Firefox Sync in this first Beta build of Epiphany 3.26 (technical version number 3.25.90), and they've also managed to implement a new custom pop-up menu for HTML select elements, as well as to add social media and annoyance blocking to built-in adblock functionality.
Homepage shortcut now disabled in Web App mode
Besides various under-the-hood improvements and updated translations, the Epiphany 3.26 Beta release disables the homepage shortcut in Web App mode and address an issue with the location of the icon database on disk. We've attached the entire changelog below if you're curious to know what exactly was changed.
Epiphany 3.26 Beta will be available for public testing as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.26 Beta desktop environment, but, in the meantime, you can download the source tarball right now through our website if you fancy compiling it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution and take it for a test drive.
As mentioned before, GNOME 3.26 Beta should land later today, but it will most likely be released by the end of the week. Rest assured that you'll be the first to know when it's available for download. The final release of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is expected on September 13, 2017.