Migrations
As usual, there are database migrations. In addition, all secrets that were previously stored in Newsflash's own configuration files are moved into the system keyring. Expect a keyring unlock prompt on first start.
Article View: Much Improved Display of HTML Content
- Support for details, summary, hr, svg, mark, q, del/ins and abbr tags
- More list styles (letters, Roman numerals, custom start values, reversed lists)
- Pick up lazy-loaded images
- Display non-video iframes as a link to the external content
- Improved styling of inline code
- Syntax highlighting of code blocks matches the article theme
- Improved math rendering
- Basic heuristic to render a backdrop behind transparent images if needed
- Basic right-to-left support
- em is styled italic instead of bold
- Quotes, dashes and ellipses are normalized
- Improved video thumbnail scraping for YouTube and PeerTube, plus Vimeo and Dailymotion embeds
- Improved keyboard navigation
- Skip hidden content
- Large articles show up immediately and are built progressively
- Lots of smaller fixes for content that previously led to broken Pango markup
Thumbnails
- Larger thumbnails by default (the old layout is available as a preference)
- Crops are centered on faces and other subjects
- Tracking pixels, banners and blank images are no longer used as thumbnails
Sync
- Reduced peak memory at the cost of more disk activity: articles are written to a temporary database in chunks and committed to the actual database at the end
- Scraping all articles of a feed is now based on the IDs of the new articles after a sync and should be more reliable
- Syncs are aware of system suspend: a sync that was missed during suspend runs right after resume
- Sync at set times of the day instead of fixed intervals
- Local RSS: external content of Atom feeds is fetched
- FreshRSS & Inoreader: starred, tagged and unread states set on other clients are picked up for existing articles
- Nextcloud News & Miniflux: removing a category but keeping its feeds no longer deletes the feeds
- NewsBlur now supports managing feeds and folders: add, remove, rename, move and OPML import
Performance
- The database switched from Diesel to SQLx, which moves all database work off the async runtime
- Separate database connections for reading and writing: a running sync no longer stalls the UI
- Additional indices to speed up various queries
- Thumbnail generation moved off the async runtime and uses more CPU resources for a ~2.5× speedup
- The sidebar and article list do less work whenever possible for faster updates
- Long article lists are now trimmed again when scrolling back up
- Fixed slowdowns and growing memory usage during long sessions
- Avoid UI updates while the window is hidden and schedule an update for when it is shown again
Article Scraper
- Moved from libxml2 to the Rust-based dom_query (built on html5ever), which should eliminate a whole category of crashes
- Dropped own readability.js implementation in favor of dom_smoothie: slight visual differences are to be expected
- Update Full-Text RSS site-configs
- Better handling of malicious or extremely large content
And More
- PDF export using Typst
- The article view highlights search terms and allows jumping to the next/previous match
- Redesigned article view menu (thanks for your patience, @tbernard)
- The justification preference was removed from the UI but is still available via the configuration file
- The image gallery allows moving to the next/previous expandable image in the article
- The audio player now lives outside of the article content, so you can keep listening while browsing other articles. It can also be controlled from the desktop's media controls (MPRIS)
- The preferred view of original or scraped content is remembered per article
- Global settings ("All Articles" → Edit) for custom user agents, "scrape after sync", muted notifications and inline math delimiters
- Optional unread count badge on the app icon via the LauncherEntry API
- Display a link to the comments if the feed provides one
- Category context menu: add feed directly to category
- Fullscreen now only fills the window and hides the other panes. The default shortcut changed to Ctrl+Shift+F
- "Yesterday" and "Today" labels are updated at midnight
- Empty summaries in the article list are hidden with the new large thumbnail layout
- Allow changing local-only feed preferences (e.g. tag colors) even if the service does not support editing feeds or categories
- Cached images and parsed HTML files are dropped after 30 days
- Lots of other small fixes and improvements
