First Beta Release of Briar GTK

Almost half a year after releasing the first alpha release of Briar GTK, today marks the day of its first beta release. Much has happened in the meantime and many people, including me, were able to test Briar GTK and use it in regular occasions. Let’s have a look at how this first beta release looks like:

For those not knowing, Briar is a messaging system that keeps information flowing all the time. Whether your internet connection has been cut due to natural disasters or because of governmental censorship, Briar will try its best to get your messages out there to your peers.

As you might already anticipate from the screenshot, it’s now much clearer which messages belong to which author. Additionally, on the left side you can see that Alice is online while Bob is offline. Support for this has landed in earlier alpha releases already. Another huge improvements to Briar’s UX is that you’re now able to copy content from messages. Beside being fully translated to German and Spanish and allowing to delete contacts, this beta release of Briar GTK also offers basic notification support. However, it depends on your desktop environment whether this will work for you.

Note that Briar GTK currently only supports private chats. Support for private groups and forums isn’t yet available in the Briar Headless API and therefore those features can’t be used in Briar GTK.

Updating to the new version is as easy as calling flatpak update or installing the new .deb files. If you’re new to Briar GTK, you might want to look at its installation instructions to learn how to install it.

If you want to stay informed about what happens to the outer Briar universe, make sure to subscribe to this rss feed which will keep you up-to-date on everything happening around Briar on this blog.

All content in this blog post got released under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Feel free to share it with your peers!