We've been a bit short in the news department recently. This isn't because there's been no news to report on but simply because I've been extremely busy. I'll be reporting on all the updates we've made recently in due time but in the mean-time, today we released a new version of NMM along with a new "Legacy" version of NMM. Let me explain what's going on.

The NMM programmers are finding that more and more of their time is being taken up by trying to support old and outdated versions of the .NET framework which is not only limiting the functionality NMM can provide but, simply put, taking an inordinate amount of time for the less than 5% of people this helps to support. The inherent issue is that Windows XP no longer supports the latest versions of .NET, specifically, version 4.5 of .NET. Statistics show that less than 5% of users who use NMM are on Windows XP. We have therefore taken the decision to branch NMM from this point on in to two releases: the normal Nexus Mod Manager and the Nexus Mod Manager - Legacy Edition.

The Legacy Edition of NMM will be for those users who either want NMM to simply stay as it is right now or who cannot use the main version of NMM due to it now requiring the latest version of .NET in order to work. It's the fall-back to support those users who can't, won't or don't want to kept up to date with their operating systems. For us, NMM is now for Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, the Legacy Edition is for users of Windows XP.

We will update the Legacy Edition with any bug fixes that can be applied but, unless a new feature doesn't make use of any .NET 4.5 features, the Legacy Edition is now feature frozen: it will not be getting any new functionality.

In other news, a lot of people have noticed that the "Download With Manager" button is not working for them on the site. Firstly, let me say that this is nothing to do with us, in that we haven't caused this problem. The problem arises with the combination of Windows 8.1 and the Google Chrome browser, and only this combination. NMM works fine in IE and FireFox with Windows 8.1. For a slightly technical explanation of what's happening: a recent silent update to Chrome has forced the browser to no longer recognise third-party URL protocols, like the "nxm" URL the Nexus sites use to start your download in NMM. Instead, Chrome will now only accept URL protocols that are classed as "safe" by Windows 8/Microsoft, which at this time is basically just the Windows Store. Great update, Google. The fix for this issue involves editing a Google Chrome config file to tell Chrome that the Nexus Mod Manager is a safe program to accept URL requests from. Google haven't coded any sort of system (like FireFox has) to ask if you want to trust the Nexus Mod Manager protocol, it just refuses to work. That's just plain laziness on Google's part.

Version 0.50.0 of NMM has added a button to the settings menu that will attempt to edit this Google Chrome config file so your download button will work again. It's experimental, and while it won't break anything, the worst it will do is just continue to not make the button work for you. We won't know until people use it. However, we can completely understand why you might not want NMM editing any config files unrelated to NMM, so for you guys I'm afraid the only option is to manually download then add files to NMM (very, very easy to do) or simply use a different browser. Once again, this problem hasn't been caused by us, and we're slightly miffed Google have taken this lazy approach.

We're obviously interested to know if this button fixes it for people who've experienced this issue, so please let us know.

Version 0.50.0 of NMM requires an uninstall of your current version of NMM before you can apply it. The process is extremely simple and NOTHING will change in your NMM so long as you reinstall NMM to the same directory. Your mods, load orders, settings and everything else won't change. If they do change then you have NOT installed NMM to the same folder, or you've changed your game folder location either physically, on your hard-drive, or within your NMM settings so they no longer point to the right location. NMM does not delete mods off your hard-drive when it is uninstalled. We needed to force an uninstall due to some of the .DLL packages changing or being removed and we didn't want people filing bug reports because they couldn't be bothered to uninstall the software like they were asked to do.

We've released a dummy 0.49.8 release of NMM which has a tweaked update mechanism for those people updating through NMM itself from version 0.49.7. If you do it this way, you'll first have to download 0.49.8, which will then direct you to the correct version of 0.50.0 to download based off the operating system you're using. If you are using Windows XP, 0.49.8 will direct you to download the Legacy Edition of NMM. If you are using Vista or higher, 0.49.8 will direct you to download version 0.50.0 of NMM. You can skip this step (going from 0.49.7 to 0.49.8 to 0.50.0) simply by downloading the latest version from the NMM download page. This process might seem a little convoluted but you'll be all done within the space of a minute (depending on your download speed).

Fingers crossed now we've got this task behind us the long awaited Profiling system will not be far behind.