LibreOffice 6.1 Now Available, Facebook Open-Sourcing Fizz, Firefox Advance Is Latest Test Pilot Experiment, Dart 2.0 Stable Released and KDE Neon Bionic Preview Images Available for Testing

News briefs for August 8, 2018.

The Document Foundation announced this morning that LibreOffice 6.1 is now available. This is the second major release of the 6 family, and it has many new features, such as Colibre (a new icon theme for Windows), a reworked image handling feature, an improved EPUB export filter, improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online and much more. See this video for more on all the new features. You can download LibreOffice 6.1 from here.

Facebook announced it is open-sourcing Fizz, a "robust, highly performant TLS library written in C++ 14". In addition, Facebook says that "Fizz now handles millions of TLS 1.3 handshakes every second. We believe this makes it the largest deployment of TLS 1.3—and early (0-RTT) data—on the internet." Fizz is now available on GitHub, and Facebook hopes that open-sourcing it will "help speed up deployment of TLS 1.3 across the internet and help others make their apps and services faster and more secure".

Firefox's latest Test Pilot Experiment called Advance is now available. Mozilla writes that with Advance, "you can explore more of the web efficiently, with real-time recommendations based on your current page and your most recent web history." Advance is a Web Extension that "works by analyzing content you're into right now in order to provide recommendations based on what you may want to 'Read Next' through a sidebar in the browser." You can download it from here.

Google announced the release of Dart 2 stable yesterday, including a rewrite of the Dart web platform. According to Google, "Dart 2 marks the rebirth of Dart as a mainstream programming language focused on enabling a fast development and great user experiences for mobile and web applications." See the GitHub page for all the changes.

KDE neon Bionic Preview images are now available for testing. You can download the ISO images from here and provide feedback in the forum.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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