Wolvic 1.6 Released

Hello, and welcome to Wolvic 1.6! Our focus for this release was mainly on bringing aboard a new supported device and firming up various things of core importance, and addressing lots of things that our users have helpfully provided feedback on, rather than adding too many splashy new features. Let’s jump in and review.

First off, we’ve added the Pico Neo3 to our list of supported devices, so welcome to the pack, Neo3 users! If you know someone with a Neo3, be sure to tell them!

We’ve also taken many suggestions toward improving fullscreen video viewing, including fixing problems some people were encountering with vertical videos on YouTube. We think we’ve cleared this up, but if you run into fullscreen video viewing problems, let us know via our feedback form or file an issue on GitHub.

The upstream dependencies used in Wolvic have been upgraded to Gecko 121 and Android Components 121.1, bringing Wolvic up to the very end of 2023 in terms of standards support and relevant patches. At the same time, we removed the telemetry privacy option on non-Huawei devices, since the Mozilla telemetry service we were using has already been disabled in Wolvic. Those running Wolvic on Huawei devices retain their telemetry privacy option, as Huawei platforms have their own telemetry system.

Wolvic is interested in working everywhere, for everyone so we’ve also expanded our translations. Currently Wolvic is fully translated to English, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, Korean, French, Danish, Swedish, and Galician. We’ve also focused a bit on the keyboard in general this release, improving the responsiveness and stability of the keyboard, and added an experimental autocomplete implementation for Latin-language keyboards. You can enable it by going to Settings > Display and then enabling “Latin Keyboard Input Auto-complete”. The dictionaries for each language will be downloaded on demand. Try it out, and send us feedback.

We’ve also added three new VR environments, from a calm country meadow to the depths of outer space. To get access to these or any of the other available environments, go to Settings > Environment, where Wolvic will automatically check the Wolvic 3D Environments GitHub repository for any new additions.

Those are the highlights for this release, but as always, there are still more changes and updates listed in the notes below. If you’ve found a new problem or have another issue, please send us your feedback or, if you prefer, file an issue on GitHub. Thanks, and we hope you enjoy Wolvic 1.6!

Highlights

• Support fullscreen vertical videos.
• Auto-completion support for Latin keyboards.
• Better responsiveness and stability of keyboard input.
• Support for the Pico Neo3.
• Add new environments.

Notes

UI

• Support fullscreen vertical videos.
• Improved support for fullscreen content in general.
• Don’t use a fixed-width viewport for desktop mode. Note that desktop mode will still affect the browser’s User-Agent.
• The preset buttons (1x, 2x, etc.) will resize a window according to its current aspect ratio.
• Lower the maximum display DPI to 300, since larger values don’t work on most devices.
• Curved display does not affect VR video.
• Fix small issues when experimental UI settings are applied.
• Fix and issue with display density when exiting VR video mode.
• Fix a bug where the browser window may be transparent at startup.
• Remove the telemetry privacy option, as the Mozilla telemetry service is currently disabled in Wolvic. This option remains on Huawei platforms, which use their own telemetry system.
• Remove the unused crash-report setting.
• Support courses.certify-ed.com
• Add new environments.
• Expanded translations. Currently Wolvic is fully translated to English, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, Korean, French, Danish, Swedish, and Galician.

Input

• Auto-completion support for Latin keyboards. This feature is currently disabled by default as we continue testing and polishing it. You can enable it in Settings, Display, Latin Keyboard Input Auto-complete. The dictionaries for each language will be downloaded on demand.
• Better responsiveness and stability of keyboard input.
• Don’t go back with the B and Y buttons in the controllers. This was rarely used and prevented WebXR apps from using those buttons.

Pico

• Support for the Pico Neo3.

Others

• Improved stability at application launch, including error handling for voice recognition, session initialization, and VR infrastructure.
• Upgrade our version of the Gecko Web engine to 121.0.1. Upgrade the Mozilla Android Components to 121.1.0.
• Shrink the size of resources in release builds.