June has been a strong month for Patchfox with lots of important achievements. The current work has been informed by an intuition that the Scuttlebutt community want clients to be more capable, now that Patchwork development has stopped. Patchfox has left some features intentionally unimplemented — because they were hard to get right — with the knowledge that most of its users were also using other Scuttlebutt clients in tandem, and could find those features elsewhere.

Now we're going to pursue a new path and try to implement all those missing features, and polish the current ones, so that Patchfox can become your main Scuttlebutt client. This will require a lot of work. I have made a plan that details how the future roadmap will be implemented. This was done as part of my current funding request to the Handshake Council. Even though funding is yet to be approved and distributed, progress has already been made on some of the items on that roadmap. You can follow progress by checking the issues on Patchfox Github Repo, I have organised all the items in the roadmap as their own issue, and created meta issues to group them by area of interest. An easy way to access the issues, is by using the browser action menu, it contains a direct link to the issues page:

Historically, Patchfox has been a Firefox-only add-on. This was mostly because I was volunteering close with Mozilla and had more knowledge about that specific browsers while still sharing many values and priorities with Mozilla Foundation. Even though all that is true, if Patchfox is to become a viable main client, it needs to meet users at their browser of choice.

A meta issue has been created to enable stakeholders to verify the progress on this wider release project. 

I'm very happy to announce that thanks to the work done in June, Patchfox is now available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Brave Browser, Vivaldi Browser, and Microsoft Edge. Users of those browsers can get Patchfox from their WebExtension store. Users of Opera can also install Patchfox if they are using Opera Next or Opera Developer. At the moment of this writing, we're still awaiting for approval for the stable Opera release.

Releasing for Safari is a more involved process because it requires the creation of a native macOS Application and going through the usual Mac App Store verification process. We're going to take that as an opportunity to provide some unique features for Safari — all is described in our roadmap — and will implement it later.

There has been kind of two releases in June. They are essentially the same but the version number had to be bumped as there were small fixes to the WebExtension Manifest file to remove unused data, and removed unused code related to SSB HTTP Auth. The code for the add-on is the same on both versions.

On Firefox Add-ons store, the version available is 2021.6.1 because it was released prior to the push for a wider release. In the other stores, they're a mix between 2021.6.1 and 2021.6.2 depending on when I added it. In the next month, I'll make them all the same.

Thanks a lot for your financial backing, it is only through generous donors such as all of you that I can keep doing this. If you have the time for it, I would really appreciate if you could: