April 2, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.3, the third bugfix and maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.0.3 is the third monthly update to KDE 4.0. It ships with a basic desktop and many other packages; like administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, web development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in 49 languages.

Enhancements

KDE 4.0.3 comes with an impressive amount of bugfixes and improvements. Most of them are recorded in the changelog. KDE continues to release updates for the 4.0 desktop on a monthly basis. KDE 4.1, which will bring large improvements to the KDE desktop and application will be released in July this year.

KDE 4.0.3 improvements revolve around lots of bugfixes and translation updates. Corrections have been made in such a way that results in only a minimal risk of regressions. For KDE, it is also a way to deliver bugfixes quickly to the users. An excerpt from the changelog reveals that nearly all modules in KDE have seen lots of improvements. Again, the KHTML team has done an awesome job in improving the user experience with the Konqueror web browser.

* Scrolling optimisations in KHTML, KDE's HTML rendering engine
* Improved handling of dialog windows in KWin, KDE's window manager
* Various rendering improvements in Okular, KDE's document viewer

Extragear

Since KDE 4.0.0, Extragear applications are also part of regular KDE releases. Extragear applications are KDE applications that are mature, but not part of one of the other KDE packages. The extragear package that is shipped with KDE 4.0.3 ship the following programs:

* KColoredit - An editor for color palette files that supports KDE and Gimp color palette formats
* KFax - A desktop fax viewer
* KGrab - A more advanced screenshot taking tool
* KGraphviewer - A GraphViz dot graph viewer for KDE
* KIconedit - A drawing program for icon graphics
* KMldonkey - A graphical client for the EDonkey network
* KPovmodeler - A 3D modeler
* Libksane - An image-scanning library
* RSIbreak - A program that saves you from getting RSI by enforcing breaks

New in this release of the Extragear application is the Gopher KIO slave, a plugin that adds support for the Gopher protocol to all KDE applications.