Kee 4.0 will be rolling out to all users soon but it’s a bit of a different release to normal.
Another huge re-write
We hope that most users won’t even notice the update, or perhaps will only notice that the connections to Kee Vault or KeePass are a bit more reliable, but that belies the immense changes required in advance of the next version of Chromium (releasing to Chrome beta testers on 12th June).
Thousands of lines of code have had to be re-written over the past year to keep the Kee project alive, and the research and initial experiments that have led us to this release began over 5 years ago!
It’s highly unlikely that every detail is perfect yet but we hope that by the time Google disable the current version of Kee in your browser Kee 4.0 will be working well enough.
Available now for alpha testing
If you are running a development version of Chrome, Firefox or Edge and want to help test out the new version before beta testers, please check out this release on GitHub:
We don’t normally highlight new releases until they are at least in the beta-testing phase but since Google have only permitted us a short time to get this new version tested before version 3.11 is deleted, and the scale of the changes required is so large, we want to encourage earlier testing from you while we continue our usual internal testing.
Please do let us know as soon as possible if you find anything broken in 4.0 that was working with 3.11.
Releasing for Firefox users later
The fundamental changes needed to keep Kee working in upcoming versions of Google Chrome (and Microsoft Edge) are only supported in Firefox 126 and above. Mozilla released this version last week but not everyone will have installed it yet. Therefore our intention is to defer the roll out to Firefox users for another month or two (probably until at least their next ESR version on July 9th).
There are some bug fixes in this version which might benefit Firefox users too so we’ll probably make a version available for beta testing sooner than that, and you could try out an alpha testing build in the mean time if you’re running the latest Firefox already.
Onwards
We hope that a successful release of version 4.0 will be completed by the end of the summer and this will finally allow us to spend more time improving the extension and adding new features, rather than running just to stand still.