Aurora: a new identity for Fluux
Fluux has a new face. The app icon, logo, and the entire interface have been redesigned around Aurora, a teal-to-violet gradient identity with display headings, softer avatar shapes, and frosted-glass modals.
Aurora is more than a color swap:
- Per-person sender colors. Each participant in a group chat gets a stable, readable color, tuned for WCAG AA contrast in both light and dark themes.
- Curated accent presets. Pick the accent that suits you; the whole interface follows, including the encryption affordances, which now use one consistent color from the chat header to the message locks and the composer.
- Calmer chrome. Thinner scrollbars, consistent focus rings, quieter notification badges. Unread indicators now follow a simple two-tier model: red means something needs you (a direct message, a mention, a contact request), grey means ambient room activity.
If you preferred the previous color scheme, it is still there as the “Indigo classic” theme.
Conversation-first navigation
We removed the standalone Events view. It was a place you had to remember to check; now events come to you, in context:
- Contact requests, room invitations, and message requests appear as headed sections at the top of the relevant lists.
- A message from someone not in your roster opens as a read-only preview with an Accept / Ignore / Block banner, so you can see what it is before you commit to anything.
- Contacts moved down to the navigation cluster, with a badge when requests are pending.
- Archived conversations are one toggle away in the Messages header, and archiving now syncs live across your devices.
The result is fewer top-level destinations and less bookkeeping.
Jump anywhere with the command palette
Press Cmd-K (Ctrl-K on Windows and Linux) to jump to any conversation or action. The palette puts your unread chats and mentioned rooms first, shows avatars and unread badges, and never proposes the conversation you are already reading.
Unlimited scroll-back
The fixed 1,000-message cap on conversation history is gone. History is now a sliding window: scroll back as far as you like, and messages load incrementally from the local cache and the server archive (MAM). Combined with message-list virtualization, now on by default, long conversations stay fast, and typing no longer reflows the message list on every keystroke.
While we were in there, we fixed a long tail of scroll issues: new messages reliably stick to the bottom on WebKit, returning to a conversation restores exactly where you were reading (even deep in history), and jumping to a search result lands the message a third of the way down the viewport instead of hiding it under the date header.
Your reading position follows you
Read markers now sync across devices (XEP-0490). If you read a conversation on your desktop, it opens at the right position on your laptop, and its notification is dismissed. Together with live archive sync and the carbons and MAM work from previous releases, your devices now agree on what you have read, what is pending, and what is filed away.
A friendlier admin console
For those who administer their own ejabberd server, the ad-hoc command list is gone, replaced by purpose-built screens: a server overview dashboard, a searchable user list with online status and last login, a redesigned user detail view with a Ban account action, and a mobile launchpad. Only a few server admin commands are available so far, but we plan to grow the list with each new version.
Desktop and everyday polish
- Window app bar. The desktop app gets back/forward navigation in a proper window bar, with correctly centered traffic lights on macOS.
- Calm updates. Instead of reloading the app under your feet, a new “Update available” button appears in the icon rail when a new version is ready. You decide when.
- Reduce motion. A new accessibility setting minimizes animations and follows your system preference.
- Advanced mode. The XMPP console and expert settings are now behind an in-app toggle, keeping the default settings approachable.
- Redesigned contact details. A person-forward view with cards for devices, groups, and security, and fingerprint verification in its own focused panel.
And the usual pile of fixes
Almost 300 commits went into this release, so the full list is long. Some favorites: your own encrypted messages now show their real trust level instead of a grey lock under some circumstances; whispers in group chats keep their corrections and reactions private; animated avatars are frozen so they stop competing for your attention, even if they are PNGs; reactions from ignored users are hidden; and rooms are sorted correctly the moment the app launches.
The complete list is in the changelog.
Try it
Fluux Messenger 0.17.0 is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, or directly in your browser. As always, it works with any standards-compliant XMPP server, and it remains our day-to-day client at ProcessOne.
If you upgrade and something feels off, tell us. A lot of what shipped in this release started as a user report.
we’ve implemented SASL channel binding (
