- ParrotSec hasn't wasted any time, since it was only a couple of months after its last major update, We already have Parrot OS 7.3 among us. This new release, available as always in its Home and Security editions, focuses not so much on adding dozens of new tools, but on improving what we already have.
The development team has mentioned that the goal of this release was twofold:to maximize the performance of processors modern and make the daily user experience will be much smoother and more agile.
What's New in Parrot 7.3
Of the most important new features and improvements in this version, the most important is undoubtedly the arrival of optimized packages, Historically, to ensure the system works on any computer, Debian-based distributions like Parrot compile their packages using an x86-64 codebase from 2003. The problem is that this wastes over twenty years of advancements in processor architecture. To address this, Parrot 7.3 introduces an optional repository with tools recompiled specifically for modern instructions (such as AVX2 or DOTPROD) available on AMD Zen, Intel Haswell, Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi 5 processors.
Although this change doesn't speed up basic tasks, it does It achieves improvements of between 20% and 50% in heavy computing tasks.such as data compression, encryption, password cracking, and multimedia encoding in tools like ffmpeg or numpy. The best thing about this system is that it's intelligently managed through version numbering, so if a critical security patch is released, the system will prioritize the standard update until the optimized version is available.
The menu is reinvented in Go: One-click installation
Ethe old menu system based on heavy scripts by Bash It has been replaced by two small and very fast binaries written in the Go language.: parrot-exec and launcher-updater. The former acts as the engine behind every shortcut you see on screen, handling the execution of commands, requesting administrator permissions without breaking graphical applications (correctly forwarding the DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY variables), and even listing directories for resources such as dictionaries.
If you see one The tool in the menu that says "not installed" and you click on it, the system searches for it in the repositories, downloads it, installs it and updates access It's direct so you can use it immediately, keeping the terminal open to maintain an interactive session. Meanwhile, the launcher-updater component cleans up the menu, creating phantom icons for uninstalled tools and removing duplicate shortcuts that sometimes come with Debian packages, ensuring your menu is always pristine.
Vagrant and navigation improvements
Parrot 7.3 premieres boxes Vagrant official (boxes) for amd64 architectureThis is wonderful for automation, because It allows you to launch complete, clean, and configured instances of ParrotOS with a single command, facilitating the creation of identical test environments for an entire work team or their direct integration into continuous integration (CI) pipelines.
Regarding everyday use, Firefox now greets you with an ultra-lightweight homepage powered by ViteFrom there you can search using privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo or Qwant and access essential system documentation, with the absolute guarantee that not a single piece of your data is collected.
Tools up to date and internal bug fixes
As is tradition, the operating system base inherits all the benefits and security patches from the Debian 13.5 "Trixie" repositories. running on the stable Linux 7.0 kernel. El Arsenal has been updated with the latest versions of tools for pentesting, including beasts like Metasploit, Airgeddon, SQLMap, Bettercap and Ghidra, among many others.
Internally, the system's own graphical updater, parrot-updater has been refactored to separate notification handling from its main logic. And now it elevates its privileges much more securely by using pkexec directly, in addition to fixing small but annoying bugs in its interface, making this version of Parrot OS one of the fastest, cleanest and most professional that the community has seen to date.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more, you can consult the details. In the following link.