Our “Lemon Meringue” release (aka Beta 3) is coming ever-closer to completion. Although we know we’ve slipped the schedule quite a bit, it’s only because we want to get this release as solid as possible. With all of the new features we added in Beta 2, it wasn’t as stable as Beta 1. Our upcoming Beta 3 release is shaping up to be our best release yet. Here are a few things you can expect (mostly technical):

• HTTP Conditional Get (a much more efficient cache management system)
• Better character set detection (including fixes for a few bugs in Beta 2)
• Allow the overriding of the input character encoding, as well as custom output encodings
• Support for GZIP-compressed feeds
• Support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
• Better handling of audio/video podcasts
• A new get_favicon() function
• More one-click subscriptions and one-click bookmarks
• Support for fsockopen() for grabbing remote feeds
• Better handling of feeds with extremely long filenames (like ebay feeds)
• Improved Atom support
• More potentially dangerous tags and attributes are stripped by default (can be overridden)
• Tweaked some default settings for configuration options for improved reliability and security
• Lots and lots and lots of bugfixes and minor improvements

For those of you who aren’t as technical, all of this essentially means that suddenly things will work better, faster, and more efficiently without you having to do anything. There won’t be too many fancy new features, per se, but there will be a few additional power-options for the technically inclined.

We’ve also heard that Kellan Elliott-McCrea will soon be releasing a “preview release” of the next version of MagpieRSS. We warmly welcome Kellan back to Feed-land (MagpieRSS has been silent since November 2005), and hope that the continued competition will help drive both products to be the best they can be.