Hello! We’re happy to distribute a beta release of the Blockstack Browser. We’re sharing the Mac and Windows native apps, which you can run on your own computer to test this out.
We are sharing this beta version for testing, in anticipation for a production release next week. We want to make sure everything with the Browser is stable, because we know that bugs can cause major problems for apps and end users. We’d love your help to make sure this stable before we release it.
A major update in the Browser is support for cross-browser protocol handlers. If you didn’t have the native app installed, and tried to login to a Blockstack app, you’d see an error on many different web browsers. We’ve published blockstack.js version 18.3.0-rc1, a release candidate for testing. If your app has this new version, your users won’t see this error when logging in without the native app.
This flow will work best when we release the next production build of the Blockstack browser. Until then, if your app uses this new version of blockstack.js, and the end user has an older version of the Browser, then 2 windows will be opened - one for the native app, and one for the hosted browser. This is still much better than hitting an error on major web browsers.
There are also a bunch of improvements in this Blockstack Browser release, mostly related to stability and bug fixes. Some of these include:
- Allowing you to reset your account on the ‘update’ page. Previously, if you entered the wrong password, you’d have to reset your browser using the javascript console.
- Fixing overwriting of stale profiles if you were logging in to Blockstack apps on multiple devices
- Fixing the profile URL contained in the
authResponse
Here are the packaged applications you can use for beta testing: