Yesterday's release rebuilt the engine. Today's teaches Chervil three things mainstream browsers never learned: where you live on the web, how to keep a working set of pages that your AI can actually use — and how to turn what you make into a real, hold-it-in-your-hand book.
Also: if tab switching felt slow in 0.15.0, it's fixed, and it's fast. More on that at the end.
Your places
Browsers treat every site the same. But you don't — a handful of them are yours: your email, your blog, your X, your Bluesky. Chervil 0.16.0 gives them a home: Settings → You → Your places. Register your webmail (Gmail, Outlook, or any URL), your blog, your socials, plus anything else with a name you choose ("work portal"). URLs only — logins stay where they belong, in the encrypted vault.
Then everything starts knowing about them:
- "Open my email." Typed, in the omnibox, or out loud — "Hey Sprig, check my blog" — and you're there. Your places show up in omnibox suggestions too.
- mailto: links finally work. Click an email link on any site and it opens your webmail's compose window, pre-addressed, in a tab — no desktop mail app required. And there's a new ✉️ Email this page button next to send-to-phone.
- One-click tiles for your places sit at the top of the welcome screen.
- Share to your networks. This is my favorite. Publish a page, blog post, or lesson, and Chervil offers to share it: Sprig drafts a different post for each network — a tight 280 for X, a friendlier Bluesky note, a warmer Facebook version — and opens that network's compose box pre-filled. You read it, maybe fix a word, and press Post yourself. Chervil never posts on your behalf. Draft after draft, network after network, the publish loop finally closes.
Collections
Favorites are for sites you visit forever. Collections are for the pages you're working with right now — the six tabs of trip research, the four GPU reviews. Right-click a tab → Add to Collection…, name it, done. They live in a new Library section, sync across your machines with folder sync, and:
- "Open all pages in the Kyoto Collection in tabs" — the whole set, back in one command.
- "Compose a page based on the Kyoto Collection" — and here's the point: a Collection isn't a bookmark folder, it's a data source. Sprig fetches your saved pages and grounds the new page on them. Your research, synthesized.
Chervil becomes a book press
Someone asked this week whether Chervil could "format for Kindle and PDF for publishing." At the time, the honest answer was no. It stopped being the answer today — the Export menu grew two entries:
- 📚 eBook — EPUB / Kindle. Any lesson or composed page becomes a proper EPUB — the format Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo all accept, and the one KDP wants for publishing. Lessons are the star: each module becomes a chapter behind a real title page (objectives and all), knowledge checks become printed Q&As with answers, flashcards become term-and-definition pairs, and the interactive applets politely note they're live in Chervil. Pages split into chapters on their headings, and a clean book stylesheet replaces the web styling — it reads like a book, not a screenshot.
- 🖨 Print-ready PDF. Pick a real trim size — 6×9 (the KDP paperback standard), 5×8, A5, or Letter — optionally add KDP-spec bleed, and get a PDF with a title page, book typography, every chapter starting on a fresh page, and page numbers. Upload it to KDP or hand it to a print shop.
And because print demands pixels, images can upscale now. The snip editor (below) grew an ⤴ Upscale 2× button — a faithful, on-device resample — and an ✨ Enhance 2× button that does real AI upscaling through your image key. The print exporter even quietly doubles small images on the way out so they don't print soft.
The snip editor grew up
0.15.0's ✂ snip could go to Sprig, the clipboard, or a file. Now it can also open in Chervil's own image editor — a real tab with text, erase, crop, and undo that work entirely offline, plus an Ask Sprig box for the edits that need intelligence: "remove the toolbar," "add a red arrow pointing at the button." It uses your Grok, OpenAI, or Gemini key (Grok's new image-edit API is impressively fast). Best part: while the editor is open, the main composer is the editor — just type what you want changed. There's an "Open in image viewer" option too, for when you want Windows to handle it.
"Hey Sprig," now with a TV in the room
I keep a TV on all day. Chervil's wake word did not love this — broadcasts kept triggering it. 0.16.0 adds the deep fixes: a detection now needs a sustained match, not a single lucky frame; the command capture tracks the room's noise floor so a TV's murmur doesn't count as your voice; and if nobody actually speaks after a wake, the recording is thrown away without ever being transcribed. Then there's Noisy room mode — one Settings toggle that turns all of it up and always asks before composing. Built for my living room; maybe yours too.
And the fix
0.15.0 gave every tab its own live view — but a CSS one-liner meant background tabs were quietly detaching anyway, so switching tabs still reloaded the page. Fixed. Background tabs now genuinely keep running: switching is instant, scroll positions hold, music actually keeps playing. This is the release where the multi-tab engine delivers what the last one promised.
Plus the small stuff: a ⟳ reload button in the toolbar, Reload and Duplicate tab on the tab right-click menu, and hide the tab bar (Ctrl+Shift+) for a full-height page — nudge the top edge of the screen and the strip peeks back out.
Get it
Grab 0.16.0 from the GitHub releases page. Chervil is open source and built in public — and this release is proof the "built in public" part works: the book press exists because one person asked for it. Come ask for the next thing on Discord.