Release Version 2.19

Release date: 2 Aug 2020.

Distribution

Source snapshots are attached to this announcement and the git tag master-filesender-2.19 contains the base that these snapshots were created from.

Installation

Documentation is available at http://docs.filesender.org/v2.0/install/

Upgrade Notes

Version 2.x breaks compatibility with version 1.x. We recommend a fresh installation to version 2.x of FileSender.

Major changes since 2.18

Execution of scripts/upgrade/database.php is not required. There are changes in the templates directory.

Downloading of encrypted files is now performed by streaming filesender chunks from the server and decrypting them as they arrive. This is a fairly major change to how encrypted downloads are performed. The testing that has been performed to verify this functionality is mentioned below. Once chunks have been downloaded and decrypted there are two ways they can be saved to a file. This allows for legacy browsers which do not support streaming writes to continue to work while features in modern browsers can allow less RAM consumption during downloading of very large files.

The two ways the decrypted content might then be handled:

• (a) on many modern browsers the content is written to disk as it is decrypted (streamed to disk) to lower the RAM requirements of downloading large encrypted files
• (b) on legacy browsers such as IE11 or browsers where functionality has not always tested positive as yet, content is retained in RAM and saved to disk after all chunks are downloaded.

The streaming option (a) is enabled by default (streamsaver_enabled setting) and streaming is enabled on Chrome, Edge, and Safari by default. It can be enabled on Firefox by setting streamsaver_on_firefox to true. There were some issues in local testing on Firefox so streaming is not enabled on Firefox by default.

As mentioned in the pull request that introduced the streaming feature (#817) testing has been performed on key_version 0 and 3 with both single file and chunked file storage configurations across many browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, IE, Safari) for a file tree of various sized files which are around filesender chunk boundary sizes. Key version 3 is only tested on supported browsers which slightly lowers the total number of tests from a tree of test files on 5 browsers on 4 configurations.

The download page also includes an option to allow the user to turn off streaming download (use legacy). That option will be set to use streaming if the configuration allows it but is available as a fallback if streaming has not worked for a user.

Configuration changes

The use of StreamSaver is enabled by default to allow streaming download. It can be disabled by setting streamsaver_enabled to false.

When streamsaver_enabled is true (or left at the default setting) the following settings can turn on the use of StreamSaver for various browsers. Some of these settings are enabled by default where testing on modern versions has worked. The browser options are streamsaver_on_unknown_browser, streamsaver_on_firefox, streamsaver_on_chrome, streamsaver_on_edge, and streamsaver_on_safari.

Support and Feedback

Please lodge new github issues for things that might improve the next release!
See Support and Mailinglists and Feature requests.