Release Life Cycle

The Wireshark download page lists three types of releases: Stable, Old Stable, and Development.

• The Stable release is the latest official version of Wireshark. In most cases this is the version you should use.
• The Old Stable release is an older official version of Wireshark which is still supported. You may be required to use this, for example if your organization has strict software approval policies.
• The Development version is used for testing new features. Use this if you need one of those features.

Wireshark 1.0 was the last release to support GTK+ 1.0. As a courtesy to those users who required GTK+ 1.0.x support it was supported for 30 months. Subsequent stable releases (1.2, 1.4, 1.6, etc) will be supported for 24 months. See End of Life planning at the end of this page.

A more detailed description can be found in the Release Policy.

Staying Current

Wireshark releases are announced on the wireshark-announce mailing list. A PAD file is also published at http://www.wireshark.org/wireshark-pad.xml.

Release Numbers

To understand the numbering of the releases, see the explanation of release numbers.

Release Planning

For the planning of the upcoming releases and their proposed contents see the roadmap.

Past Releases

Here is the collection of changes for the various releases made in the past:

• Development/Trunk-1.10

• Development/Trunk-1.8

• Development/Trunk-1.6

• Development/Trunk-1.4

• Development/Trunk-1.2

• Development/Trunk-1.0

• Development/BetaReleases

End of Life planning

In order to limit the development burden support for a (old-)stable release is eventually ended. This is the planning for abandoning old releases. A note is added why such release may still be relevant for you.

Discussion

Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. Wireshark 1.10 will support XP but the next major release likely won't.

U3 reached end of life in 2009. We will stop producing U3 packages after 1.10 reaches end of life.