Site Features are controlled by Site Owners, not by us

We often get Support Requests of the type:

Can you add Feature X to Lite App Y?

E.g. can you add Filters to Instagram, or can you add Make Payments feature to PayTM.

Hermit is a browser, just like Chrome or Firefox. Hermit Lite Apps are a better way to access Mobile Web Apps that are developed independently by other companies, such as Facebook, Google, or millions of others.

But we don’t control any of those sites on the Web

Features available in individual Lite Apps are developed by the individual companies that make those apps. If a Lite App does not support a particular feature via their Mobile Web App, please contact them directly and request them to add the feature.

In general, if a feature is not available in Chrome or Firefox when accessing a web site, then it will also not be available in Hermit. This is not a bug in Hermit, it’s a decision made by the web site owner.

What about Push Notifications?

Unfortunately, due to the way Push Notifications are designed to work, we don’t believe you can use them in Hermit any time soon.

The main reason is that web sites have to actively take steps to push notifications to all the browsers they want to support. They have to do this separately for each browser. As such, they are likely to only choose the top one or two browsers, like Chrome or Firefox. Since they have to do this separately for each browser, we are not waiting around for them to take steps for Hermit.

That’s why we chose to do pull-based notifications. We’ve designed Hermit Notifications to be flexible as well as standards-based (Atom / RSS or Web Monitors) to serve a majority of users’ needs. But Push remains a task that we cannot fully undertake without support from every site on the Internet, so that’s going to be a bit tough.

Can you investigate why Site X won’t work correctly?

If there’s a problem with a certain site, and is not a general wide-spread issue, we may not be able to prioritize it high on our list.

Testing and addressing any issues with every single site on the Web is a daunting task, especially because many sites on the Web don’t follow standards perfectly.

So our prioritization of testing each individual site depends on how many people are affected by an issue, and how popular a particular site is. This unfortunately means that if a single user has a problem with a single site, it is lower in priority compared to other issues.