September is always a busy month for us as many people return from holidays to their regular schedules. Along with the changing of the physical seasons, we're marking a number of project milestones as well.

Dropping support for Internet Explorer

Microsoft's Office365 platform officially stopped supporting Internet Explorer 11 in August, and we decided it was a good time to do the same. Up until our 4.11 release we were careful to maintain compatibility with this browser that had not received any new features since 2013. Moving on from IE lets us rely on modern functionality, simplifying our code and making CryptPad smaller and faster to load.

End of NLnet PET

As described in our toots and tweets on September 9th, 4.11 also included significant improvements to our Forms app. With this second round of changes deployed we are nearly ready to close our third and final NLnet PET project before NLnet foundation concludes their NGI0 Privacy-Enhancing Technologies program.

NLnet's advocacy for open-source software and direct support of its developers has had an incredible impact on our project and hundreds of others like it. If you haven't already done so, now is a great time to skim through the list of projects they've funded to count how many of them you personally use!

DAPSI Phase 2

We're also approaching a milestone for the NGI DAPSI project that we've been working on in parallel. We'll present our latest research into client-side file format conversion, including some prototypes that we hope to deploy later in the year and our findings from the survey on file format conversion requirements that closed earlier this month. If all goes well we will receive a second round of funding to continue with the proposed work plan.

A brief pause in our regular release schedule

The next few weeks are likely to be quite intense for us. We'll be focused on wrapping up our current projects and preparing to launch a new round of projects for 2022. There are several very promising opportunities on our horizon and it looks like we're going to have to hire to be able to follow through on all of our plans.

We'll announce exactly what positions we're looking to fill within our team and provide updates to our roadmap as soon as a few more details are finalized. A number of important deadlines happen to coincide in a short timespan, so we'll take a short break from our regular release cycle and resume our usual pace later in October.

Until then, thanks to all our supporters!