Privacy Browser 2.1 has been released. It fixes a crash on load introduced in version 2.0.1 if the homepage was set to be blank. When working with blank homepages, I also changed the default behavior so that the URL text box is selected and the keyboard is automatically displayed.

A bug was fixed that prevented Privacy Browser from loading localhost URLs. This was caused because Patterns.WEB_URL.matcher was used to determine if the input text was a URL or a search term. Patterns.WEB_URL.matcher does not consider localhost to be a WEB_URL. The fix causes all entries that contain localhost to be loaded as a URL. This creates a new problem if someone is searching for a string that contains localhost. The workaround is to perform these searches directly on the website of a search engine instead of using the URL text bar.

Another bug was fixed that prevented URLs loaded from the URL text bar to load correctly if they contained special characters like : or =. This was caused because the special characters were not being correctly encoded in UTF-8.

The website favorite icon is now reset to the default every time a new domain is loaded. This prevents websites like Evercookie from displaying the favorite icon from the previous domain.

As the most common reason for tapping the URL text bar is to type a new URL, the entire text is now selected when tapped. A second tap will allow editing of the URL. A double tap will provide options for cut, copy, and paste.

The order of the items in the main options menu have been changed so that the options that (I believe) are used least frequently are at the bottom. This is so that users with small screen devices don’t have to scroll as often.

The green highlight that indicates custom domain settings are applied now has rounded corners, which makes it look a little more polished. The URL loading progress bar now goes all the way across the screen instead of being constrained to the width of the URL text box.

As usual, an updated Italian translation was provided by Francesco Buratti and an updated Spanish translation by Jose A. León. Privacy Browser currently doesn’t have a German translator, so the German translation is getting increasingly out of date. Please contact me if you would like to volunteer as a German translator (or as a translator for any other language).

The next release will continue the work of winnowing down the list of open bugs and feature requests.