MathJax v2.0 release scheduled for Sunday, Feb 26th

[Davide P. Cervone]

MathJax v2.0 is scheduled to be released this Sunday, February 26th.  At that time, the master branch at GitHub will become v2.0 and we will tag it and form a 2.0-latest branch, as described in the MathJax installation documentation.

At the same time, the CDN will be updated to include a mathjax/2.0-latest directory, and the mathjax/latest URL will be switched to point to that.  If you are using 

http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js

in your pages, then you will start using MathJax v2.0 automatically when the switch occurs; there is nothing you need to do to upgrade to the new version.  If you are using mathjax/1.1-latest, then you will continue to receive MathJax v1.1a until you change to the 2.0-latest URL.  If you have your own copy of MathJax on your server, you will need to upgrade it to the new version; see 

http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/installation.html

for details about upgrading using git, svn, or a zip archive.

MathJax v2.0 has been in beta test for several weeks, and we are confident that the switchover should be a smooth one.  We have made backward compatibility an important goal, but there are a few items that you may need to be aware of.  See

http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/whats-new-2.0.html#important-changes-from-previous-versions

for details of the changes that might affect you.  If you wish to stay at v1.1, you should use the mathjax/1.1-latest URL rather than mathjax/latest when you load MathJax.

During the cutover to v2.0, the files at mathjax/latest will be switched from v1.1a to v2.0.  Since the URL is unchanged, however, that means some users may have cached copies of v1.1a for some files, but receive v2.0 versions of others.  That may cause MathJax to fail for those users.  To help reduce the time period where users may have a mix of versions in their cache, we are temporarily reducing the expiration times for the CDN to 1 hour.  That should mean that the caches are flushed quickly in hopes of minimizing any caching problems during the version change.  The longer expiration time will be restored later in the week, once the transition is complete.

If you get complaints about MathJax not working, you should suggest that your users clear their cache and restart their browser (some browsers require the restart to fully clear the cache).  If that does not resolve the problem, please report the details to us at

https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues

or via the MathJax user's form at

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mathjax-users

Thank you for your continued support and use of MathJax.

Davide P. Cervone

MathJax developer