Privacy Browser 2.4 has been released. It adds a dark theme option. Originally I planned to do a completely black theme for AMOLED devices. However, as I worked on it, I didn’t like the way the black theme looked. Instead, I decided to go with a dark theme, which works well in low light scenarios.
If there is significant demand, I would consider adding a black theme as a third option. However, the effort to create and maintain the theme is significant, especially when supporting earlier versions of Android, which don’t allow tinting of certain icons, requiring separate drawables for each theme. I think the power saving difference on an AMOLED screen between the dark theme and a black theme is not likely to be significant enough to justify the effort.
Because of the way Android is (currently) designed, Privacy Browser has to be restarted for a change in theme to take effect.
The domain name is now printed in black while the rest of the text is printed in gray.
For websites that aren’t encrypted, the “http://” is displayed in red, bold text. Unencrypted websites are very bad for privacy, and in this day and age there is no excuse to run an unencrypted webserver, so whenever you visit a website that is unencrypted it is a warning to you that the website operators don’t understand what they are doing or don’t take your privacy seriously.
Settings were added to control what happens on Clear and Exit. If all of these are disabled, Clear and Exit will close Privacy Browser but leave all data intact.
The default homepage on new installs was changed to https://start.duckduckgo.com. When JavaScript is enabled, https://duckduckgo.com now has an annoying popup that appears every time cookies are deleted. Note that there is a bug in https://start.duckduckgo.com and https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion that cause JavaScript-disabled searches to fail. If DuckDuckGo isn’t able to fix this problem soon I may have to do something else with the default homepage.
When clearing cookies, DOM storage, or form data from the options menu, the snackbar now has an undo option.
A bug was fixed that caused pending webpage changes to be lost on restart. Also, a problem with the spinner layout on some Huawei devices was fixed.
An updated Italian translation was provided by Francesco Buratti and an updated Spanish translation was provided by Jose A. León.
The major planned feature for the next release is SSL certificate pinning.