Magento 2.3.3 Release - Feature Highlights & Download Links

Since the release of Magento 2.3.2, merchants expect to get brand new functions, patches, and enhancement features in the next version to improve website performance.

On October 8th, Magento introduces the latest version - Magento Commerce 2.3.3 and Security-only patch 2.3.2-p1 in this upgrade session. Let’s look at how these new upgrades on the Magento marketplace extension can make awesome changes for your owner's site.

• Over 170 functional fixes.
• Over 75 security enhancements.
• Over 200 contributions.

A summary of new changes in Magento 2.3.3

• Security: Magento developer team works on fixing bugs, security exploits, in the platform. This update includes approximately a hundred reported fixes. Additionally, Magento incorporated changes to the native payment solutions in order to legalize online transactions for European countries.
• Performance: This new version enhances loading time efficiency and provides a better overall shopping experience by displaying text while loading web-fonts in the background and hovering non-critical CSS items to the end of the loading queue. Performed enhancement helps the Google PageSpeed Insight score of Magento sites increase up to 5 points in some cases.
• Quality: There are over 190 product quality enhancements in critical areas such as Sales, Catalog, and checkout modules.

Enhance secure systems through the New Security-only Patch Release

This year, the development team at Magento has been focusing on improving the security of the platform. In the first 8 months, Magento developers have managed to reduce security issue backlogs by over 93%. The Magento (development) team has changed approach to security work by making a whole road map of strategic changes until 2020 in order to improve the security in Magento 2 across the board.

Magento team provides a separate security patch first focusing only security that bases on the lastest prior full patch. 

“It will give you the option to get just the security fixes you need for Black Friday, but delay the less time-sensitive quality, performance, and other changes until later” .

Magento dev team

Magento 2.3.3 feature highlights

Highly focus on security enhancements

Security performance and core code

This release includes over 75 security enhancements and more than 170 functional fixes to the core products. Most of their effort help close XSS, RCE vulnerabilities and other minor security issues.

Moreover, most of these issues require access to the Admin first, customers can protect themselves with some methods: IP whitelisting, two-factor authentication, use of a VPN, the use of a unique location rather than /admin, and good password hygiene.

Addressing the new Payment Services Directive (PSD) regulation

Besides fixing critical issues and solving the backlog of security enhancements of the previous patch, The team implements changes according to PSD2 to core payment methods, that legalize online transactions requiring SCA regulation. The core Magento payment options have been updated with some PSD-related changes:

• Braintree payment method has been upgraded to the latest JavaScript SDK v3 API (a major implementation supporting native Braintree 3D secure 2.0).
• Authorize.net is now able to make 3D Secure verification through third-party services. Starting from this release, Authorize.net accept.js integration will support 3Ds 2.0 through CardinalCommerce.
• Cybersource and eWay payment modules temporarily unavailable in this release for updates PSD2 requirements.

Infrastructure improvement

In every Magento release, the infrastructure dimension is always the focus because of its impact on customer satisfaction and retention. Besides bugfixes and minor changes, this version has two notable updates to the infrastructure system. Below are the additional feature enhancements:

Support for the latest PHP versions

For better performance, Magento 2.3.3 supports PHP 7.2.x (tested with 7.2.21) and PHP 7.3.x (tested with 7.3.8). Developers are able to get more features, functionality, and performance boost to the Magento 2 websites.

Update to Varnish cache 6.3.0

This is the newest version of Varnish cache, also known as HTTP reverse-proxy. As an open-source web application accelerator, varnish cache helps users to re-configuring it to suit the basic needs and improve high-performance content delivery.

Improvements to UI and UX

This update brings minor improvements to the UI of the backend for better admin experience. 

Get a better understand for administrative users

Magento 2.3.3 provides a new merchant tool for admins. After finishing the update process, the first admin logging into the Admin panel will be prompted to Allow admin usage data collection.

If the user clicks the allow button, Adobe Analytics will capture all the data from admin activity for analysis and reporting. 

Some major changes to the UI

As improve the performance of the core storefront task, the jQuery/UI library has been refactored into separate widgets that makes the core module loads only the selected widgets. Besides, there are some minor changes in the designs and functions of certain tab: Category, Order, Admin, the Credit Memo page, and Catalog.

Product catalog performance

The product catalog performance was improved a lot to follow the vendors’ needs. Adding more changes to enhance the ability to display products in the catalog queue. Stock information is now better synchronized between the front-end and the back-end.

Improved sales management

To help managers track their products and bills easily, the Magento team provides some notable changes in the backend site. Adding more dynamic, flexible feature ensure a seamless experience. 

Download Link and Release Notes

The download links and release notes for both the Open-source and Commerce edition are now available to the public.

You can download the latest version here and get more details on the new patch by reading release notes.

Because this version brings extensive security patches and most essentially, compliance to PSD2. We highly recommend updating to v 2.3.3 as soon as possible.

Follow our blog to stay updated on the latest news and contact us via email sales@magenest.com if you need help upgrading to Magento 2.3.3.