This is the stable build of everything that landed across the 1.0.38 prereleases, plus a set of sign-in and session fixes made after the last one. The headline is that logging into sites is a lot more reliable now, and a rare bug that could silently wipe every saved login is gone.
What's changed
Sign-in and saved logins
- Fixed "Sign in with Google" (and other social sign-ins) failing to actually log you in. Ventus was re-running the sign-in handoff behind the scenes, which restarted the flow with a fresh security token each time, so the site ended up rejecting the session. You could sign in, but a refresh put you right back on the login page.
- Fixed a rare bug that could silently and permanently log you out of every site at once. The file holding the key your cookies are encrypted with was rewritten on every launch without a safety net, so a single interrupted write destroyed it, and every saved login went with it. That file is now written safely, never overwritten when it can't be read, and left alone entirely when nothing needs to change.
- Saved passwords no longer fall back to an unprotected key if the password key can't be read.
- Cookie backups that fail to decrypt are now dropped instead of being restored as empty logins, which used to leave sites in a half-signed-in state that a refresh couldn't fix.
Crashes
- Fixed the browser's network process crashing on signed-in Google sites. This was behind almost every crash in the logs, and Google Meet in particular. It came from a session-security feature that can never finish setting up inside Ventus, so it was doing nothing except crashing, and it is now switched off.
- Pages that were left half-loaded by one of these crashes now reload themselves instead of sitting there as unstyled text.
- Browser engine crashes are now reported automatically. They used to be completely invisible, which is why this took so long to find.
Pages loading correctly
- Fixed Google search sometimes getting stuck showing only the search bar with no results, mostly on slower laptops. Ventus now reloads automatically when the page is killed mid-load, without touching your cookies or sessions.
- Going to a page, or using Back and Forward, now wakes the tab properly instead of leaving a dark grey screen until you manually refresh.
- Opening a sleeping or restored tab could silently drop its first load. It retries on its own now.
- Tabs no longer get stuck blank after a background browser process crashes mid-navigation.
- Added a real loading spinner, and pages appear the moment they paint instead of showing a flat dark rectangle.
Launch and shutdown
- Fixed the browser going "not responding" on launch, especially after it didn't close cleanly last time. Leftover browser engine processes are now cleared before the window builds.
- Startup no longer terminates unrelated processes if the system reused an old process id.
File uploads
- Fixed uploads where the file picker opened fine but choosing a file did nothing. Ventus was firing focus events into the page the moment the dialog closed, and some upload widgets read that as a cancel.
- Fixed a follow-up upload bug where the same flow could still fail intermittently.
Site compatibility
- Fixed light-themed sites like NotebookLM rendering unreadable dark-on-dark text while Ventus was in dark mode. Pages pick their own background now, like a normal browser.
- Updated browser identity headers so strict sites are less likely to reject Ventus or serve a broken page.
- Ventus no longer reports an outdated browser version when the local WebView2 runtime version can't be read.
Ad blocker
- Updated the built-in ad blocker to the latest uBlock Origin Lite, with two months of newer filter lists.
Search
- Added Ecosia as a built-in search engine, selectable from onboarding or settings. Ecosia's own ads are always allowed through so it can keep funding tree planting, and the ad blocker menu says so.
Window and interface
- The window shrinks much smaller than before, with the minimum width down from 800 to 460.
- The toolbar reflows when narrow, so the address bar stops overlapping the window buttons, and the sidebar resizes instead of getting cut off.
- You can grab the left edge to resize while the auto-hide sidebar is on. Hovering it still opens the sidebar.
- New tab pages can be reordered by drag like any other tab.
- The tab right-click menu now closes the tab after opening it in a new window.
Under the hood
- Startup now records the health of your browser profile and cookie backup, and reports it automatically if the cookie key is missing or unreadable. This whole area used to be invisible, which is why the logout bug went unexplained for so long.
Installer
SHA256: 75571307782B419CFBC6F38B74F502C2DC231E8FA5747CBAA69BE350134E44F4
No settings reset is needed for this build, and your existing logins are not affected by updating.