Quest 5.9 is now available

[alexwarren]

A new version of Quest is now available - Quest 5.9.

This is the first release at all for over six years (the last release of Quest was in mid-2018) and the first since I took over the project again.

Among a lot of bug fixes and tweaks (see the release notes for full details), the main changes are:

• the embedded Chromium browser has been updated (from 2014's v39 to a much more recent v130), meaning more recent web features will now work on the desktop version.
• system requirements have been upped, now requiring a minimum of 64-bit Windows 10 or 11.

Download Quest 5.9

Much bigger changes are coming to Quest soon, so stay tuned...

[David-Jareth-Bowie]

Awesome work! However, any idea why Microsoft Defender SmartScreen couldn't verify if it was safe?
Then would not automatically allow me to start the program, saying it may be a risk to my PC. And after installing it, Quest tells me I have to restart my entire PC. Why is that?

[alexwarren]

The setup EXE file is not code-signed. This was the case for the last few releases as well. It used to be possible to obtain a code signing certificate fairly cheaply if you were an open source developer (earlier releases of Quest 5 are signed with one), but sadly that's no longer the case, so unsigned it is - meaning you have to click through the warning.

(Side rant - weirdly this is something cheaper on the Mac side of things. With a $99 developer account from Apple, you can sign code. But Microsoft sends you off to various third parties who charge thousands of dollars and have bureaucratic identity verification requirements that assume you're running some kind of corporation)

The setup script installs the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable, which is a prerequisite for the embedded version of Chromium (via CefSharp) that Quest uses. This will probably require a restart if it updates a system file that is in use.