Riot is now faster to launch! Last week saw the long-awaited release of Riot Web 0.9.8, bringing significant performance improvements making Riot much nippier to start up, along with now optionally supporting phone numbers for identity (available in these countries). All this, and the usual host of bugfixes, usability tweaks and stability improvements 😄
Riot Web 0.9.8 was particularly long in coming (0.9.7 was released back in Feb!) due to the major rearchitectures involved in the performance work, as well as a lot of time going into improving scaling of the underlying Matrix components. We expect a 0.9.9 release much sooner though — there’s already a bunch of further performance improvements and refinements ready to go live!
Performance improvements
The performance improvements are the big story. The team has been hard at work implementing two new performance features —using indexeddb to cache Riot’s state in browser local storage, hugely reducing app startup time and web workers to handle management of this cache seamlessly in the background.
Riot launch should now be faster for everybody, but power users in particular should notice the speed-up 😊 Let us know how you get on!
Phone numbers for identity
The latest release of Riot enables users optionally to use mobile phone numbers as well as (or instead of) email addresses for logging in and for user discovery.
Make it super easy for your friends on Riot iOS/Android to find you by linking your phone number with your Riot account — just go to the user settings page to add your number. Linking your phone number with Riot requires us to complete phone number verification, which is live in more and more countries every day — check the list of supported countries to see if we can reach you.
Unbanning enabled
To err is human; to forgive, divine — you can now forgive fellow Riot uesrs and revoke bans; just scroll to the bottom of the room settings to find the list of banned users:
In conclusion…
As always, thank you for your continued enthusiasm, interest and support! For the finer details please check the full changelogs for Riot Web, the Matrix React SDK, and the Matrix JS SDK.
