Removed support for Internet Explorer. We have removed support for Internet Explorer from our CSS. IE11 will still work with our software but it will always be displaying its mobile view, even on desktop. Microsoft has already announced that it will stop supporting IE11 in Microsoft Teams beginning November 30, 2020 and terminate all IE11 support in August 2021. We decided to remove IE support starting September 2020 because it was adding unnecessary bloat to our code and prevented us from implementing features we needed. Not to mention that this seven year old browser is barely used anymore.
Inherit the base font size instead of defining a fixed one. In the past, our software was setting a base font size of 12.5px. While this is a fairly reasonable size for able bodied users on most desktop and mobile displays it doesn't work well for users with accessibility requirements necessitating a bigger font size or users who otherwise need scaled text for any reason. We changed our CSS framework to inherit the document's base font size to mitigate this issue.
Improve default header and body fonts for similar cross-platform "feel" without the need to use custom fonts. Our software used to require two custom fonts Montserrat and Open Sans for header and body text respectively. These fonts were not shipped with it to maintain a reasonable download size. As a result, we fell back to using your platform's default sans-serif font which would sometimes not be the best choice for readability. We are not using your platform's preferred fonts for UI headers and body text, giving our software a more readable and native appearance.
.htaccess Maker: Automatically compress static resources will now use Brotli compression with priority if it's supported by both the server (mod_brotli) and the client (accepts encoding "br").. Brotli is a newer compression format which offers better compression ratio than GZip. It is natively supported by Apache 2.4 when the relevant Apache module is loaded. It reduces the amount of data transferred, making your site load much faster.All modern browsers support it. As long as your Apache server loads mod_brotli all you need to do is regenerate your .htaccess with Admin Tools to support Brotli compression.
.htaccess and NginX Conf Maker: Neutralise SVG script execution.. This option, disabled by default, applies Joomla 3.9.20 recommendation for disabling script execution in SVG files with some improvements we added on top of it. We recommend against enabling this option if you rely on interactive or animated SVG files. We also believe the attack vector described by Joomla is irrelevant for most sites, seeing that Joomla does NOT allow upload of SVG files unless explicitly configured to do so. If you don't know what SVGs are you don't need to bother with this setting.
.htaccess Maker: Improve "Redirect index.php to the site's root" code. The previous version of this code was using a hardcoded reference to your site's domain name. We are now using a simpler version that doesn't require a hardcoded reference to the site's domain. This works better when you are also using the non-www to www (or vice versa) redirection or redirecting from old domains to a new one.
Improve the UX of the URL Redirect form page. Having already tried naming the fields From/To, Old URL/New URL, Existing URL/New URL in the past it would appear that people are split exactly evenly in their understanding of what is redirecting to what. In this version we are labelling the fields as "Visiting This" and "Takes You Here". There is no room for misunderstanding anymore.
More clarity in the in-component update notifications, explaining they come from Joomla itself. We've had a lot of support tickets and bug reports about updates. The thing is, even though we show you an update notification inside our component the actual detection of new versions and their installation (extension update) are carried out by Joomla itself with code we have no control over. We have now changed the wording of the in-component messages to better clarify where this information comes from and what happens when you click the update button.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
We only officially support using our software with the latest Joomla! release branch, 3.9. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of Joomla! for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites.
We offer limited support for Joomla 4.0 which is currently in Beta. Akeeba Backup will run on it, back it up and restore it just fine as of Joomla 4 Beta 3. Please note that since Joomla 4.0 is still in beta it may undergo potentially breaking changes between now and its final release. Joomla 4 specific issues are addressed when we are notified about them or observe them ourselves but they will not be treated as urgent until at least Joomla 4 Release Candidate 1 is released by the Joomla! project.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues.
At the time of this writing we have only done some preliminary PHP 8 compatibility testing for the backup engine, PHP 8 being in alpha. We expect to be able to fully support PHP 8 around 2-4 weeks after Joomla implements full PHP 8 compatibility. PHP 8 itself is scheduled for release on November 26th. Our prediction for full PHP 8 support is before the end of January 2021, as long as Joomla adds support for it by end December 2020.
Please note that earlier PHP versions including but not limited to PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0 are no longer supported and our software no longer works on them.