14 DAY TRIAL // While many are waiting impatiently for the release of the KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS desktop environment, the KDE community announced today on Twitter a new feature of KDE Plasma 5.13.
Yes, you're reading it right, we're talking about KDE Plasma 5.13, the version of the Linux desktop environment that will be coming after KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, which is hitting the streets at the end of the month, on January 30, 2018.
A short-lived branch, KDE Plasma 5.13 will be released on June 12, 2018, and it appears that it brings better web browser integration by allowing users to control and monitor various aspects of their web browser like playback, downloads, and tabs.
"Coming up in Plasma 5.13: Control and monitor many aspects of your web browser using desktop-integrated features. Play and stop playback, integrate downloads with the notification widget, and access tabs from KRunner," was stated in the tweet.
Features designed to increase the productivity of KDE Plasma users
As you can see in the video attached below, courtesy of the KDE Project, KDE Plasma 5.13 will allow you to control video and audio players in websites from both the right-click context menu and thumbnail of the browser's entry in the taskbar.
Also, you can also view active downloads in the notification widget, as well as find browser tabs in the "Run Command" window. All these features look great and promise to increase the productivity of users when using the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment.
They're currently supported with the Google Chrome and Chromium web browsers, but Mozilla Firefox support should be available in the future. If you can't wait until June, you can try them now in KDE Neon by installing the plasma-browser-integration package.
In related news, the KDE Project released the other day the fifth and last maintenance update to the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, which brings more than 30 bug fixes across various core components. Users are urged to update to KDE Plasma 5.11.5 as soon as possible.
Coming up in Plasma 5.13: Control and monitor many aspects of your web browser using desktop-integrated features. Play and stop playback, integrate downloads with the notification widget, and access tabs from KRunner.https://t.co/cF5pd5WpDh pic.twitter.com/IWKuVEEVn6 — KDE Community (@kdecommunity) January 3, 2018