We never thought that we will see a new, major stable version of the Transmission open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client, ever, but what a surprise, Transmission 2.90 arrived on February 28, 2016.

Not only that, but looking at the changelog, we can notice that Transmission 2.90 is a major release, hence the new version number. There are over 50 changes in this release of the free BitTorrent everyone loves and use, besides uTorrent, of course, which is full of adware.

Prominent features of Transmission 2.90 include better renaming of torrents with a common prefix, support for PolarSSL, CyaSSL, and WolfSSL cryptographic backends, support for OpenSSL 0.9.7 or later, CMake support, lots of improvements for Windows systems and removal of support for Windows XP/2003 and Vista.

Moreover, Transmission 2.90 adds support for the miniupnpc 14 API and libevent 2.1 library or higher versions, implements absolute paths as a requirement in RPC (Remote Procedure Call) requests, unifies the display of torrent's origin for all clients, improves validity checking of UTF-8, and no longer build transmission-cli by default.

GTK+, Qt, Web, and Mac clients received improvements

Besides the general changes mentioned above, the official changelog also notes the fact that the Mac build of Transmission received a lot of love for this major release, such as user interface improvements for Mac OS X 10.9 or later, support for trimming potential URIs from clipboard, and support for downloading from HTTP servers on El Capitan. Please note that Mac OS X 10.6 is no longer supported.

While the GTK+ client received only two fixes, one of them being related to support for GTK+ 3.16 or higher, the Qt client got multiple improvements, among which we can mention the addition of a context menu on the files tab of the Torrent Properties dialog, improvements to the filter bar look and feel, and better magnets handling. The Transmission daemon and web client also received various fixes.

Download Transmission 2.90 for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.