Avant Force Blog

First off, you should all know that a development cycle is conducted to produce a stable, bug free, final release. Like all software, it is better to take the time to get a release the best that it can be instead of rushing it out causing problems for users. We know you have been waiting for a very long time for this release and we really appreciate your patience. As with any project, this one has had its share of delays but the team developing this next version of Avant Browser is taking the time to get it right. We regret these delays but they were necessary and we hope you will like what is coming.

Since January 09, when the next version, codenamed “Avant 12“, was originally announced, there has been a lot of work done to completely overhaul Avant from the ground up. Everything you know and love about Avant will remain however it will look and feel much better. The biggest change you will notice is a completely revamped interface with a whole new skinning system. It will still use the Trident rendering engine from the currently installed version of Internet Explorer. But also a lot of things had to be done to fix the source of the problems plaguing the current release, Avant Browser 11.x, and that is the kernel(core) of Avant, it handles the internal workings such as memory usage, stability, and operation.

Final plans are still being decided upon but due to how long it has taken to develop Avant 12, the project may be broken up into two releases. How they will be broken up and when these releases are coming out are not known right now.

• Fixed the bug where the Duplicate function ignores ” Create new tab next to current tab” settings
• Added Ctrl+Wheel Scroll to zoom the web page for Avant Browser based on IE8
• Fixed the bug where the zoom level of a webpage would change when navigating backwards
• Fixed the bug that caused an Encoding error when sending a page by outlook
• Fixed the bug that caused you to be unable to preview videos on Bing.com
• Fixed the bug where Avant Browser failed to navigate inside http://www.gamebanshee.com/
• Fixed the encoding problem in exported bookmarks
• Fixed a bug making the Address Box lose focus when Auto-Complete is enabled

Dear Translators,

It’s that time of the year again. As we are welcoming the year of 2010, we like to express our appreciation to all of your help ever offered to Avant Browser in the past. Your constant supports keep making our software outstanding among other rivals and encouraging us to do even better in the future.

Avant Browser has been proudly selected from European Commission to be the inclusion into the Browser Choice Screen for Europe during users installing Mircosoft’s windows 7. The screenshot would come as the attached browser.jpg(in the zipped file).

Avant Browser would show up with a logo and short description among the browsers listed in the attached picture. We need the description about Avant Browser to be translated to your language. Besides,current Avant Browser’s installation interface comes with English only, so we’re planning to change it to your language as well in next build.

We hope you can help us by translate the attached shortdescription.txt and interface.txt (both in the zipped file) into your language prior to this final Windows 7 release around Europe.

Note for the interface.txt, you just need to translate words in the right of “=”, keeping “%APPNAME%” and “:” what they are now in the text file.

Please make sure to save the files with your language name for us identifying and send them back to tr[at]avantbrowser[dot]com before Jan. 5th.

Up to now we’ve got some feedbacks from our translators, but still have following languages untranslated:

Estonian
Finnish
Latvian
Lithuanian
Romanian
Slovak
Slovenian
French
Hungarian
Spanish
Swedish

We feel appreciated if translators being able to translate above languages could contact us ASAP.

Wish you the best for the New Year 2010.

Sincerely,
Avant Force

Download: avant_interface_lng.zip

As some of you may have heard the EU’s European Commision has forced Microsoft to include a ballot screen on all Windows computers running either Windows XP, Vista, or 7, you will get it through an update on Windows Update. This ballot screen is a solution to complaints other browser makers have made claiming that it is unfair that Internet Explorer has the advantage of coming with the Operating System and is the first browser a user sees when they turn on their new computer.  Avant Browser has been selected as one of the 12 most popular browsers that will be included on this ballot screen for download. The ballot screen will only be available in 30 countries within the European Economic Area.

Excerpts from the Seattle PI’s Blog:

The European Union dropped antitrust charges against Microsoft on Wednesday after the software company agreed to give users a choice of Web browsers. But will that really change anything for Microsoft?

Under the settlement, Microsoft will give European users of its Windows operating system a ballot screen for choosing their preferred browser. Microsoft also will give computer manufacturers the ability to turn off access to Internet Explorer and set any browser as default.

Twelve browsers will be featured on the ballot screen: IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, AOL, Maxthon, K-Meleon, Flock, Avant Browser, Sleipnir and Slim Browser. However, only the top five – IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera – will be prominently displayed.

Starting in March, Microsoft will deliver the ballot screen via Windows Update for users of Windows XP, Vista and 7 in 30 European countries. It’s estimated that more than 100 million computers will pop up the browser ballot, with 30 million more expected over the next five years.

Here’s a look at the first and second page of the ballot screen:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/library/20091216mockup.jpg

Source: Seattle PI

• Fixed a page opening glitch from the clipboard
• Some minor fixes in language packs
• Fixed the crashing problem happening during composing a Yahoo E-mail
• Fixed the glitch keeping opening a link in the background while using the middle mouse key regardless of whether the related option was checked or not
• Fixed the problem that the Address Bar drop down list was truncated by the Roboform Toolbar