Time for Midori 0.5.0. I’ll say upfront the big number 5 doesn’t convey any major amazements or surprises. What this number does mean is two things that will unfold their true meaning in the near future: We’re adding support for WebKit2 behind the scenes, much of which didn’t make the feature freeze. Another behind the scenes feature is improved extension loading, which will enable extensions in private browsing or in app mode.

A small highlight is in fact the Cookie Security Manager. What’s hiding behind this name you may wonder. Accepting, or rejecting and managing cookies per site as they come in real-time with infobars. The perfect augmentation for Cookie Manager and of course nice in combination with Clear Private Data and Adblock.

On the command line and kiosk use case front, -e or –execute has become a great deal more powerful. It’s now trivial to update any settings at startup or during runtime, as well as enabling or disabling extensions.

The speed dial has always been a cause of heated discussions. Many people want to have a custom page in new tabs, others want just the bare empty page to keep focussed on the task at hand (or even the subjective efficiency of not loading the speed dial). So we finally allow configuring what new tabs display. It’s now also possible to use speed dial as your homepage, from a bookmark or even the command line. about:version lists the new alias URLs, including about:dial and about:home.

There’s more treats to be found, such as completely configurable Mouse Gestures, waiting for a GUI to be added, maybe a good starting point for a new contributor. And History List finally supports ColorFul Tabs fully.

As of this release, any proxy server type supported by libproxy will in fact be accepted. The server including the protocol can be set via its curl-esque syntax in the preferences.

So download Midori v0.5.0 (1.1 MB) (MD5) (ChangeLog) already!

Also Midori v0.5.0 32-bit Portable for Windows (32 MB) or Midori v0.5.0 32-bit Installer for Windows (34 MB) now. You are welcome to join #midori on irc.freenode.net and help testing pre-releases for Windows. You can make the difference by helping out!