At the same time, this is the first release after the GUADEC conference, The new Gnome version sees the introduction of tabbed browsing to Nautilus. On top of this, the file manager can now restore from trash. Evolution now has Camel DB summary, and Google Contacts support, as well as a new EPlugin for message templates.

The Evince document viewer now supports 7-zip compressed comics; the keyboard shortcuts "Alt"+"Left arrow", or "Alt"+"Right arrow" rotate content, and media player buttons are suported. In Cheese users can now select the webcam as a preference; the program now uses the OGV format as the standard file extension for video. File Roller now supports the alz and rzip compression formats, can handle self-extracting ZIP packages, and creates multi-volume archives if needed.

The "gnome-backgrounds" package is a new addition containing wallpapers from a design competition organized by Gnome. Under the hood, the GLIB library has moved up to version 2.17.4 and GTK+ to version 2.13.5. On top of this, there have been numerous bugfixes and documentation updates. For details of the changes, check the Release Notes.

As Gnome 2.23.5 is a test version, users should not install it for production use. However, the developers would be happy for people to "Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it." If you want to follow the call, you can use Garnome or jhbuild to build the source code. The first BETA version is scheduled for release August 20. The programming interfaces in the form of APIs and ABIs) will be frozen July 28 say, the developers, followed by a feature freeze August 4.