Privacy Browser Android 3.19.3 was released on 31 January 2025. A crash was fixed that manifested on certain devices and configurations when the bottom app bar was used and the keyboard was displayed when the Navigation Drawer was opened for the first time. Something about the animation of these three things caused a race condition that reliably resulted in a crash on certain devices under certain conditions. The fix for this is to open and close the Navigation Drawer when the app starts with a bottom app bar, which causes the contents of the Navigation Drawer to be inflated correctly. This is rather annoying, but it appears to be the only way to address the crash, at least until Google fixes the underlying cause.

The Navigation Drawer now scrolls to the top when using the top app bar on devices where the Navigation Menu is taller than the screen. This bug was introduced with the switch to target API 35 in the Privacy Browser Android 3.19 release, but it only manifested on Android <= 14 (API <= 34).

The change I am most excited about with this release is that the web cache is now entirely disabled. While looking for a solution to the Navigation Drawer crash described in the first paragraph, I came across the documentation for disabling Android System WebView’s web cache, which I didn’t previously know was possible. When JavaScript is enabled, websites can use the cache to determine if you have previously visited the site before by timing how long it takes each resource to load. Because loading from cache is always faster than loading over the internet, the time different indicates if the site has previously been visited. Not only can a website determine if you have previously visited their own pages, but they can also check to see if you have visited some other webpage by loading a resource from that page and seeing how long it takes. Completely disabling the cache has some negative implications when it comes to the speed of loading of websites, but the privacy benefits far outweigh any downsides.