Hermit 11 is now on Sale, with better Night Mode, more free Lite Apps, improved Reader Mode, and new Psycho-Kinetic powers!

Wait, no, wrong 11.

Anyway, Hermit version 11 is packed with lots of other goodies, and it’s on sale throughout the rest of 2017. Begin 2018 with a faster way to browse your favorite content. Get it now

New to Hermit? Lite Apps are fast and lean Web apps, tightly integrated with Android. With Hermit, you can create your own Lite Apps out of any Web site. Unlike a usual traditional browser, Hermit integrates Lite Apps into your Android OS, so that you can share from any other Android app to a Lite App, search from within the Lite App, get notifications via Atom & RSS feeds, and customize Privacy Settings, Content Settings, and Behavior for every single Lite App individually — features you won’t find in any other browser. Hermit is proudly Android-first and Android-only, and follows Material Design guidelines to bring you a superb user experience backed by solid engineering & a commitment to your privacy: no personal data collection, no behavior tracking, all brought to you by a small California indie developer.

OK, now back to what’s new this week:

Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements!

No, we’re not kidding! OK, maybe just a little.

At Chimbori, we’re always diligent with providing you detailed changelogs about every single new feature in every single release. In this particular release, we took extra care in perfecting and polishing the features we already have, and have addressed a lot of the feedback we have received over the past several months.

Enhancements to “Free Forever” Mode

We want to enable more of you to keep using Hermit without paying, so we’ve made changes to our Free Forever mode.

  • 50% more Free Lite Apps! 3 instead of 2. Yeah, it’s just one more, but hey, that’s 50%! /r/wedidthemath
  • Clear visual indicator of which Lite Apps are available to use Free Forever without paying for Premium.
  • Change your 3 Free Lite Apps as often as you want! You can reorder your Lite Apps any time, as often as you want, to change which 3 can be used free forever. The top three in the main list are the ones which will run fully for free.
  • Time remaining in the trial period is shown clearly at the bottom, and dismissed permanently when either Free Forever or Premium option is selected.

No more Demogorgons in Night Mode!

We apologize that the previous implementation of Night Mode was buggy, and we completely re-wrote it for this version. We gave up on Google’s recommended approach and simply rolled out our own. We’ve slayed the last remaining Demogorgons.

Dark CSS Style for Alternate Dimensions: When turning on Night Mode, the default page CSS is automatically set to Dark. It’s like being in an alternate dimension. Hermit has always used the Dark CSS approach for Night Mode (instead of the inverted-colors approach which fails miserably on pages that are already dark), but today’s update changes the CSS automatically for you instead of requiring an extra step on your part. If you missed setting this in previous versions, check out Lite App > Customize > Behavior > Night Mode Page Style & pick from one of the 10 available ones.

Travel to the Upside Down: Screen Orientation can now be set for each Lite App separately. Prefer to always use your music synthesizer Lite App 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 now!

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. Unlike other browsers that show you a single paragraph of text without formatting, Hermit’s Reader View is based on our own Crux Extractor (which we open-sourced!) which preserves basic formatting and makes articles more readable.

Instant Reader View: Hermit reuses the same HTML that was already downloaded for the page by your browser: this makes it instant, saves network costs, and includes JavaScript-generated content automatically.

Automatic AMP Redirection is gone, just like Barb. Users reported several navigation problems with AMP sites that had not configure their redirects correctly. 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).

Save Usernames and Passwords with AutoFill: This one has been a huge request from all of you, and Android Oreo finally makes it possible to save passwords without resorting to any unsecure methods or practices. Note that sites have to enable support for AutoFill, so if some of your favorite sites aren’t working in Hermit yet, let them know and point them to this article from Google.

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.
  • Material Design Preferences UI on Android KitKat.
  • Brought back support for Notification Channels & Android Oreo, now that Google has fixed the bug that caused certain phones to crash.

Internal Improvements

  • Supports Android Go devices!
  • New TLDs (top-level domains) introduced in 2017 are now recognized correctly.
  • Rewrote networking code using OkHttp & RxJava: better error handling & performance.
  • 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
  • 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.

See http://ift.tt/20ZmLSk for the full details!

More about Hermit

  • Stable, Frequent Releases: We release new versions of Hermit roughly every few weeks, after they’ve met our high quality bar & undergone rigorous testing by our thousands of Beta testers (thank you, all!) So, we don’t have to push bug fixes on a daily basis & you don’t have to spend your precious bandwidth downloading repeated updates to the app every couple days just because we made a boo-boo.
  • We publish a detailed changelog for every major and minor version: check it out at http://ift.tt/20ZmLSk
  • Hermit itself (the APK) is as light as it can be, under 3 MB. (Yes, even with all these features!)
  • We respect your privacy: We are a private California company, not a fly-by-night operation or a massive scam to collect and sell people’s personal information. We don’t collect any personal information, we don’t sell any data to anyone.
  • Hermit requires absolutely no permissions to work. Zero!
  • Your are our customer, the main source of our revenue, to whom we owe our allegiance: We make money by making a superior product that we hope you, our users, enjoy & pay for. You would typically use Hermit for several hours a week. Yet, it’s cheaper than a sandwich.

The bottomline is, if you value your privacy at the price of a sandwich, then Hermit is for you.

Go get the Hermit 11.0 update!



Submitted December 30, 2017 at 08:39PM by chimbori http://ift.tt/2Ctf5mF http://ift.tt/eA8V8J

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