14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development release towards GTK+ 3.18, a powerful, cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces, used by default in the GNOME desktop environment.
GTK+ 3.17.1 is the first development version of the upcoming GTK+ 3.18 GUI toolkit and has been released today, April 29. According to the internal release notes, which you can view at the end of the article, GTK+ 3.17.1 introduces a significant amount of new features and fixes numerous bugs discovered since GTK+ 3.16.2.
Prominent features include horizontal wheel scrolling support with Shift, support for detecting more trackpoints, dozens of improvements to the HighContrast theme, improvements to error messages in GtkBuilder, Wayland DND and clipboard fixes, and improvements to CSD (Client-side Decorations) without a compositor.
Support for Windows XP has been dropped from GTK+
Starting with GTK+ 3.17.1, support for Microsoft's Windows XP operating system has been dropped. In addition, support for horizontal mouse wheel scrolling has been added for Microsoft Windows OSes. Also, attached modal dialogs with Mutter are now supported in Wayland.
Moreover, a gtk-builder-tool utility has been added for validating UI files, indicators have been modified to be more reliable when popping up, powerful entry focus was introduced in the Adwaita theme, support for pens and erasers has been added, as well as support for strikethrough and underline color in GtkTextView.
Last but not least, GTK+ 3.17.1 introduces a tab for CSS nodes and displays accessible description and name in the Inspector, it now uses a popover for new folder names in the GtkFileChooser, updates several language translations, and fixes over 60 bugs, including broken Firefox scrollbars.
You can download GTK+ 3.17.1 right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that might contain unresolved issues. Thus, it is not recommended for production environments. GTK+ 3.17.1 will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.17.1 desktop environment, which should be out later today.