Today sees a new release of Liferea with fixes, translation updates and some major changes.
Integrated Download Manager
Starting with Liferea 1.15.9 there is a simple integrated download manager. The idea is to
be roughly on-par with the features modern browsers support. While the download manager
is basic it should improve user experience a lot.
Up until now we had a hard-coded list of typical download managers. This had several
disadvantages:
- Those integrations broke with every major distro release as those different download managers kept appearing and disappearing.
- I suspect many users didn't know what "aria-gtk" / "kget" / "uget" actually are.
- Checking if those options are actually installed in the system is ugly.
- There is usually a look&feel gap when launching the download manager sometimes using
other toolkits or a very complex GUI
Now Liferea has a very simple download manager implemented using simple single thread
Python network fetching. Hopefully this will increase usability and download workflows.
Rendering Changes
This release fixes the dark theme switching regression in the item view. The dark mode item view
feature was lost some releases ago because of GTK4 deprecations. Since GTK4 there is no more
GTK supported way to determine theme colors.
To still do dark mode switching Liferea follows (Devhelp and other tools using WebkitGTK) which
switch light/dark mode purely with CSS and static theme-independant colors.
Sadly this will mean a visible color mismatch to the GTK theme. This is mostly appearant in
dark mode. Also the link color is set to blueish and can't follow the GTK theme color for links anymore.
Many other applications are also suffering from this. Sorry there is just no way to do it anymore.
If you really hate the default CSS style please consider changing them using custom CSS.
Item View Layout Redesign
Along with the theme adaptions come a redesign of the item view. To be honest the look & feel
is heavily inspired by Jan Lukas Gernert's NewsFlashGTK which I consider very well done. It is a very
calm theme reducing distraction and a good balance for reading longer and shorter texts.
Reader Mode Removed
The user facing options to enable/disable "Reader Mode" in the preferences and the item view pane
content menu are now gone. The code paths were too complicated and the results and fallback in case
of errors was very unsatisfactory.
Still the use of "Readability.js" the library behind "Reader Mode" is still active. It is now automatically
applied when the HTML scraping is used. No user interaction needed.
Changes
* #1391: GObject refactoring nodePtr -> Node, updateJobPtr -> UpdateJob
to allow plugins modifying the feed list.
(Lars Windolf)
* Fixes #1387: Dark theme lost in preview window
(Lars Windolf)
* Fixes HTTP redirects not working
(Lars Windolf)
* Fixes memory leaks in network callbacks
(Lars Windolf)
* Fixes unnecessary LifereaBrowser clearing on layout change
(Lars Windolf)
* New unit tests for update handling code
(Lars Windolf)
* #1388 Implemented download manager plugin, all preferences
for external tools were dropped
(Lars Windolf)
* Refactoring of plugin management, code reorganized. Disabling plugins
now does not disable base plugins (needed for auth and node sources)
as this would prevent startup
(Lars Windolf)
* Refactoring of content scraping, processing now happens in Javascript
on entire source documents. We now store a bit more data, but get better
extraction results
(Lars Windolf)
* Support for lazy loading <img data-src=""> definitions. This unbreaks
images when scraping some websites
(Lars Windolf)
* Redesign of the HTML view. Look & feel is adapted from Newsflash.
There is now a max-width and less cluttered reading.
(Lars Windolf)
* Getting rid of XSLT in favor of using Handlebars.js
(Lars Windolf)
* Updated Czech translation (Amereyeu)
* Updated Albanian translation (Besnik Bleta)