Roadmap: Gnome 2.24 with Webkit

Gnome 2.24, which is planned for September 2008, will use the Webkit rendering engine, Apples fork of the KDE renderer KTHMTL, in the Epiphany browser. Webkit has now been ported to the GTK+ toolkit and has achieved good grades with respect to web standards conformity.

The Evince document viewer will support comments. This is the result of a thesis based on the Google Summer of Code 2007. On top of this, it will provide better accessibility support. The Evolution groupware client will be able to access Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007, unless licensing issues prevent this from happening.

Gnome 2.24 may contain a number of new modules: Conduit, a file synchronization program, the Hamster time management applet, and Empathy, a set of instant messaging widgets for desktop integration.

Further 2.x branch Gnome versions will see the developers rework IMAP integration in Evolution, replace the volume control with a Pulse audio mixer, and add OCR capabilities to Evince. The Roadmap has a comprehensive list starting with 2.24. There are still no answers to if and when Gnome 3.0 will be released. For the time being, gradual development of the 2.x is still on the cards.