Meredith Johnson
The CrossOver team is proud to announce the first release of our new add-on experience, CrossOver Preview. Preview offers bleeding edge updates, including a newer Wine version and the latest fixes to get specific games and applications working.
The why
As our team has been adding compatibility for more and more games and applications, we’ve been trying to resolve tension between two conflicting priorities. We pride ourselves on very high-quality stable releases to ensure that our users that rely on CrossOver for critical productivity applications have a consistent experience with CrossOver updates.
However, ensuring the quality of a release comes at the expense of speed. It takes our QA team a few weeks to run through our standard test cases, and then our awesome BetterTester community tests our beta versions for several weeks. When all is said and done, it takes us between 6 and 9 weeks between when we have something cool developed and when we can get it into an official CrossOver release.
This cadence starts to feel nearly glacial when we have new code changes that get games and applications newly working. To combat that, we’ve occasionally done smaller releases with small and safe changes in order to cut down on release time. Unfortunately, not all cool things can be done with small safe changes, so this strategy has limited usefulness.
With CrossOver Preview, we think we’ve come to a happy compromise. When we have enough improvements to share, our QA will do their standard test cases, and once it looks good to us, we will release that build as CrossOver Preview. Users with access to Preview (more on that below) will have access to our Preview Center, where they can let us know how Preview is working for them. Our team will review the reports and make sure that any regressions get fixed for the next Preview release and the next stable CrossOver release.
You get cool new features faster, and we get feedback on potential bugs faster. This win-win is our dream come true.
We will continue to offer stable CrossOver releases at least twice a year, with Preview releases in between. We will also continue to push out fix releases for any critical bugs that come up. For folks who aren’t interested in the latest and greatest, everything with our stable CrossOver product will remain the same as before.
The who
The first Preview release is invite-only. This product is an exciting new challenge for us, and we want to make sure that we work all of the kinks out of the release process before we release to the public.
We sent invitation emails to all of our CrossOver Life users, in addition to a select few other very active BetterTesters and affiliates. If you received an invite, please follow the instructions in the email to get access to Preview.
The what
Our first Preview release is full of goodies. Preview is based on Wine 9.6, so you’ll get all of the updates from the last six Wine development releases. In addition, we have some targeted fixes for various games on Mac. Tekken 8 is now fully functional, including multiplayer. Cities: Skylines II and Elite Dangerous are newly working out of the box. We also included support for H.264 decoding which fixes crashes with many games, including Monster Hunter Rise and Mortal Kombat 11.
Up next
Future Preview releases will be made available to anyone with active CrossOver + or CrossOver Life support entitlements. If your support for CrossOver + lapses, you will lose access to all Preview builds as well.
Since this is a new venture for us, we don’t have an exact timeline yet for the next Preview release. We are continuing to work on new features, and of course there’s always plenty of good work happening in upstream Wine. When we’re happy with our Preview processes and our current development processes, we’ll have our first open Preview release.
When our next Preview release is ready, we will post again here. Be sure to subscribe for updates!
About Meredith Johnson
Meredith has been with CodeWeavers since 2019, and currently wears both the QA Manager and CrossOver Product Manager hats. After getting her PhD in linguistics, she somehow stumbled into the Free and Open Source Software world. When she isn't testing CrossOver, she's probably perfecting yet another bean stew, jogging slowly, buying even more linen tunics, doing a face mask or doting on her perfect chunky baby.
