Hermit 11 — Night Mode, Reader View
Nov 30, 2017
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Free Forever Mode Improvements: You can reorder your Lite Apps any time, as often as you want, to change which 3 are your Free Forever Lite Apps.
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Night Mode: When switching for the first time to Night Mode, the default page style is automatically set to Dark. Previously, this required an extra step of changing the style manually.
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Estimated Reading Time in Reader View: When reading any article on the Web, Hermit automatically computes Estimated Reading Time and offers a quick shortcut to clean up the page and view it in Reader View, including fonts, formatting, and images.
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Instant Reader View: Hermit reuses the same HTML that was downloaded for the page in your browser: this makes it instant, saves network costs, and includes JavaScript-generated content automatically.
We’ve logged 249 commits (that’s a lot!) since the last version, including performance enhancements and bug fixes.
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Automatic AMP Redirection is no longer available: users encountered several navigation problems with AMP sites that did not configure their redirects correctly, and many AMP pages are broken in the wild, leading to a worse user experience than with the regular non-AMP page. We recommend Hermit’s Reader View as the recommended replacement, which works better for all pages (AMP and non-AMP).
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Screen Orientation can now be set for each Lite App separately. Prefer to use your music synthesizer in landscape mode? Or Google Maps Go with your screen flipped so that the charger cable can be at the top? Yep, Hermit can do that!
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Usability & Visual Improvements
- ⚡ Open links in browser directly (no Custom Tabs)
- ⚡ New button in the main Lite Apps list to open the Customization UI directly.
- ⚡ Animated progress bars, like in Firefox Focus.
- ⚡ Remove support for the Create Content FAB. Users are getting confused, and it conflicts with any FAB that the actual site might want to show.
- 🐞 Sorting Lite Apps handles upper-case/lower-case correctly.
- 🆕 Better home screen when opening Hermit for the first time.
- 🆕 Minor change to the icon: no more plus sign in the corner, to avoid confusion with Android Oreo’s Notification Dots.
- ⚡ Rewrote networking code using OkHttp & RxJava: better error handling & performance.
- 🐞 Material Design Preferences UI on Android KitKat.
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Internal Improvements
- ⚡ Supports Android Go devices!
- 🆕 New TLDs (top-level domains) introduced in 2017 are now recognized correctly.
- ⚡ Support for many more Atom & RSS Feed formats: RSS 0.9, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 & Atom 0.3.
- 🐞 Switched to Google Support Library for In-App Billing.
- ⚡ Set Lite App titles so they can be used by Tasker in the %WIN variable
- 🐞 Brings back support for Notification Channels & Android Oreo, now that Google has fixed the bug that caused certain phones to crash.
- 🐞 Fixed a memory leak related to the Blocked Ads counter shown in Quick Settings.
- 🐞 Better error handling & stability fixes for WebView errors.
- 🐞 Temporary work-around for bug introduced by Google in WebView, which broke back/forward navigation.
