Brevier 0.11.0

Threads from Hacker News, Lobsters and Discourse, Rust documentation read whole, and a round of small fixes.

Hacker News reads as threads. A story opens with its link, site, points, author and day, then every comment with its author and its day, replies indented; a reply too deep to indent says whom it answers. Short replies that are mostly a link are no longer dropped. The front page and the other lists of stories — new, ask, show, jobs, past — are lists of links with a link to the comments, and Space at the end goes to the next page. A comment's own page names its story and its parent.

Lobsters and Discourse too. Lobsters threads read the same way, and a link to one comment (lobste.rs/c/…) opens the thread at that comment. Discourse forums recent enough to serve Markdown were already read as they serve it; older ones are now read from their page for clients without JavaScript, every reply with its author and day.

Rust documentation reads whole. Pages from docs.rs, the standard library and any rustdoc build come from rustdoc's own layout: signatures as highlighted code, every method and implementation in order, none of the buttons.

Tables of labels and values keep their labels. Wikipedia's infoboxes and MDN's summaries lost every row label; each row is now a line, Developer: The Rust Team. In other tables a row label becomes its first cell.

Smaller things.

• A title no longer carries the site's name when the page's heading says it without ("… — Smashing Magazine"), and a title like "
  …" keeps its first word.
• A link with a line break inside no longer falls apart into brackets.
• Links inside a code block are plain code.
• Code marked brush: html is highlighted as HTML.
• A link to a section written with underscores (#technical_summary) finds its heading.
• "Skip to main content" is no longer listed as the site's menu.
• A small picture among words — an avatar next to a name — stays in its line instead of taking a line with a caption.
• A date or a count ("13 October 2026", "321 comments") is no longer broken across two lines.
• On Android, a change of mobile network or system language no longer reloads the app.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.11.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.11.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), brevier-0.11.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe and brevier-0.11.0-windows-x86_64.zip (Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.10.0

Ready-made type, two lists instead of three, and a crash fixed.

Ready-made type. The Type section in Settings now starts with four styles: Brevier (as before), Book (your system's serif, 18 pt, justified), Large print (21 pt, shorter lines, more space between them) and Compact (15 pt, longer lines, more on the screen). The style your type matches is lit, and a line under the buttons says what it is. The single choices — face, size, line length, line spacing, justified text — are under Fine-tune, folded away unless your type is already your own. Brevier is the way back, so the Reset button is gone. In the window, a style that would not fit on the screen is refused, as a single choice is.

Two lists instead of three. The archive was the history and the bookmarks over again, with the text. Its menu item gives way to Search what you've read (Ctrl+Shift+F), and the results are titled "What you've read". The bookmarks now show each page's copy with its date, and say that a bookmark keeps it for good; the history says what "your copy" is. brevier:archive still lists every copy.

Forget everything keeps the bookmarks' copies, as it keeps the bookmarks.

"Your copy" means the archive alone. A page opened from the week's cache now says "Opened without downloading, saved 2 days ago".

Fixed: typing an address on the Settings tab closed the window, with every tab in it.

Brevier's own pages are hyphenated — the start page, the history and the bookmarks — so they read well justified too. The window's sample of your type no longer keeps the height of the previous one, and the phone's hyphenates as often as an article.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.10.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.10.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), brevier-0.10.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe and brevier-0.10.0-windows-x86_64.zip (Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.9.0

The type is yours, and a few fixes.

Your type, chosen once for every site. Settings have a new Type section, in the window and on the phone. Choose the face — the built-in Noto Sans, or whatever your system calls serif or sans — the size, the line length and the line spacing. A sample above the choices is set in what you pick, and every page follows. The size scales the whole page, headings, indents and code panels included, and the line length is kept in ems, so a line holds the same number of letters at any size. Zoom stays what it was: on top of your type, for the run only. Only what you change is written to settings.tsv.

Justified text, as a setting. Paragraphs get a straight right edge; headings, lists, code and poems stay ragged. It reads best on pages that name their language, because Brevier hyphenates only those.

More pages are hyphenated. A page with no language on <html> but with one on its <body>, <main> or <article> is now hyphenated by it.

Archive search shows the text you read. A snippet used to show the Markdown behind it — a link's ](address), backquotes, asterisks. It now shows plain text, and a word that appears only in a link's address no longer counts as a match.

On the phone, a link from another app opens on top. If the tab list, settings or the shelf was open when you left Brevier, a link you then shared or tapped in another app opened under it. Now the page comes first.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.9.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.9.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), brevier-0.9.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe and brevier-0.9.0-windows-x86_64.zip (Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.8.1

Security fixes. Updating is recommended on every platform.

A picture inside an SVG no longer reaches your disk. An SVG image on a web page could put a file from your computer into the picture, or make Brevier read until memory ran out; on Windows it could name a network share, and Windows would send that share your password hash as soon as the page opened. An SVG now shows only the pictures it carries inside itself.

A deeply nested page no longer crashes Brevier. A page, feed, SVG or Markdown file with markup nested hundreds or thousands of levels deep could crash the program with all its tabs, or keep a tab busy for minutes. Such pages are now refused with "The page is nested too deeply"; real pages come nowhere near the limit. --check reports them as access-too-deep.

TLS. rustls 0.23.45 fixes a flaw in the TLS 1.3 handshake (RUSTSEC-2026-0285).

Smaller. On Windows an archive address can no longer name a file outside the archive, and the release build pins the third-party steps that make its files.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.8.1-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.8.1-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), brevier-0.8.1-windows-x86_64-setup.exe and brevier-0.8.1-windows-x86_64.zip (Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.8.0

Brevier on Windows, and a margin in a narrow window.

Windows. The window now runs on Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. brevier-0.8.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe installs it for you alone, with no administrator rights: it adds Brevier to the Start menu and offers it as a browser and under "Open with" for Markdown and feeds. Remove it under Installed apps; your history and bookmarks in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Brevier stay. brevier-0.8.0-windows-x86_64.zip is the same program to run from any folder. The command line comes along as bin\brevier.exe. The installer is not signed yet, so the first start shows "Windows protected your PC": choose More info, then Run anyway. Screen readers do not see the window on Windows yet.

A margin in a narrow window. The text no longer touches the frame when the window is narrow: it keeps a margin of one text size on each side, as on the phone.

Your disk stays yours. A link on a web page to a file on your computer — file://, C:\…, a network share — no longer opens it, and an image on a web page can't be read from your disk, as in other browsers.

A Markdown file with a space in its name, handed over by a file manager as a file:// address, opens: the space used to stay %20 in the path.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.8.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.8.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), brevier-0.8.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe and brevier-0.8.0-windows-x86_64.zip (Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.7.0

The archive, reading progress, and copies of pages that are gone.

The archive. Every article you read is kept as a compressed Markdown file, one per page, in ~/.local/share/brevier/archive/. lz4 -d opens any of them without Brevier. brevier:archive lists them by day, and Ctrl+Shift+F searches them all (Search your archive, in the phone's menu). A copy says so above its text: "Your copy from 9 October 2026". A switch in Settings stops new copies; Forget everything deletes them.

When the page is gone. A page that can't be shown now offers your copy, if you read it before. If the page itself is gone — a 404, or a host that does not answer — it also offers Read the Wayback copy: the latest copy the Wayback Machine saved of the page, not of its 404. archive.org hears the address only when you press the button.

Reading progress. Brevier notes what you have actually read, not how far you scrolled. Open a page you read for ten minutes or more, and it offers "Continue from 45%" for a minute; it does not jump by itself. A thin strip under the article shows the share read, and the shelf shows it for each section. On the phone too.

News sites read better. Articles that React-based sites stream into the page (Anadolu, N+) arrive whole instead of as a lede or a byline. An article with a "read next" block in the middle is no longer taken for a list of links. BBC articles keep their opening paragraphs.

On the phone. A tap on the address opens a card under it: Share, Copy, Edit, and Paste and go when the clipboard holds text.

The start page says in plain words what to type in the address bar, with an example of each, and five things that are easy to miss.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.7.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.7.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.6.0

Links from the keyboard, the next page, and pages from the older web.

Links from the keyboard. In the window, Tab and Shift+Tab mark the next and previous link on the page, starting from what is on screen; Enter follows it, Ctrl+Enter opens it in a new tab, Escape drops the mark. Past the last link, Tab moves on to the header and the shelf, as in a browser. The mouse's back and forward buttons now go back and forward.

The next page. A page that names the one after it — a series, a multi-page article, a book chapter, a thread's second page, marked with rel="next" — ends with a Next: line, in the window and on the phone. In the window, Space at the very end of the page goes on to it. Nothing is fetched until you ask.

Pages from the older web. A page that names its encoding only inside itself — <meta charset="windows-1251">, KOI8-R and the like — used to fail with an error about invalid UTF-8, reported as if the network had failed. It now opens. A feed served as text/xml with its encoding in the header is no longer decoded twice into gibberish.

Menus out of the text. On sites where the article and the site's menus share one container — GitHub Pages' stock theme, for one — the menus, the toggle buttons drawn as text and the site's own title no longer arrive as part of the article. They are on the shelf, where they were already.

On the phone. A link from another app, opened after a tap in an article, showed the previous tab's address in the address bar; it shows its own now.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.6.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.6.0-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.5.6

Fixes for formulas, sharp images and the window icon. Nothing changes on the phone.

Formulas on the line. A formula with something below the line — a subscript, a bracket, a comma, a fraction — used to stand above the text around it, because the window put the bottom of the picture on the baseline. The formula's own depth below the line, which MathJax and Wikipedia write into the image, is now honoured: the formula sits on the line as in a browser, and the line makes room for what hangs below it.

Sharp images on high-density screens. On a screen with a scale factor of 2, pictures, diagrams and formulas were decoded at half the pixels they are shown with and came out soft. They are now decoded in the screen's own pixels, at the same size on the page; a small picture stays its own size. Moving the window to a screen of another density redraws the page.

The window icon. Where the window shows its icon in the header — the Flatpak build under GNOME and Ubuntu — the icon no longer sits flush against the window's edge.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.5.6-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.5.6-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.5.5

A fix for code blocks in the window. Nothing changes on the phone.

Code blocks in the window. A code block is drawn as one panel: the margin above and below the code and any empty line inside it are painted like the lines of code. They used to keep the colour of the page, so the panel was a thin strip under the code, cut in two at every empty line. On the phone the panel was already whole.

Extraction. The fix that keeps Wikipedia's photographs from turning into their description pages now lives in the extraction library itself (dom_smoothie 0.18.2, from a patch sent upstream), and Brevier's own workaround is gone. Pages read exactly as before.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.5.5-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.5.5-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), and SHA256SUMS.

Brevier 0.5.4

A smaller APK. Nothing changes in the app itself.

Android. Unused code is now stripped from the APK (R8, as the F-Droid review asked): the app's own code goes from 2.2 MB to 144 KB, and the APK from 13.7 MB to 13.0 MB. Most of what is left is the reading core, which was already as small as its compiler makes it. The build is still reproducible.

Linux. No changes.

Files: brevier.flatpak (any distribution, with Flatpak), brevier-0.5.4-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (GTK 4 from the system), brevier-0.5.4-arm64.apk (Android 7 and later, 64-bit ARM, signed with the release key — it installs over earlier versions), and SHA256SUMS.