With the release of Privacy Browser 1.13, the default user agent was changed to PrivacyBrowser/1.0. This causes most website to load the desktop instead of the mobile version. There are implications for YouTube playback that were interesting enough to warrant a separate post. When a YouTube video, either on YouTube’s website or embedded in another…

Privacy Browser 1.13 adds a full-screen browsing mode. Double-tapping on the screen will hide the app bar and make the system and navigation bars translucent. There is an option in the settings to make the full-screen mode hide the system and navigation bars as well. In this mode, they can be temporarily shown by swiping…

Charles Fisher brought to my attention that SSL encryption on KitKat is insecure (outdated) and susceptible to MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks when visiting secure websites using Privacy Browser. A MITM attack is performed by a third party that owns some of the network equipment between a browser and the website it is trying to…

Stoutner’s privacy prolicy has been updated. Verison 1.3 adds sections for Google Play and direct communications, like email and website comments. It also clarifies that in all cases reasonable effort is made to not use information in a way that would make users uncomfortable.

Privacy Browser 1.12 has a forward/backward history list. There are many websites (an example being twitter.com) that forward or redirect URLs within their domain, sometimes multiple times. When visiting these URLs, pressing back would go back to the redirect, which would then reload the current website. Sometimes this could be overcome by tapping back multiple…

Privacy Browser 1.11 was released a little before I anticipated because of a nasty bug in 1.10 descovered by a user, Hartmut Kemmer, that caused it to consume massive amount of CPU, even when running in the background. A line of sloppy code was causing the options menu to constantly be destroyed and regenerated. This…

Privacy Browser 1.10 includes proxy integration with Orbot, which is a much requested feature. When the proxy is enabled, the app bar background turns light blue. Enabling Orbot proxy support proxies all web requests through localhost port 8118. If someone has a need to proxy to a different IP address or port please let me…

Privacy Browser 1.10 will include an implementation of the DNT (Do Not Track) header. Because the implementation is not perfect, I felt it deserved a separate post. DNT Is Useless Although I believe the intentions of those who developed DNT were good, it does not provide any real additional privacy to users. This is because…

A new section of the website has been added that contains an annual security and privacy canary statement. Privacy Browser is not yet at a stage where a canary statement is necessary, but if it becomes successful, and is used by as many people as I expect it will be, there will come a point…

Privacy Browser 1.9 and 1.9.1 have been released. Version 1.9.1 fixes a small problem that caused 1.9 to fail to build on F-Droid. Privacy Browser 1.9 includes a German translation provided by Aaron Gerlach. Maintaining a translation requires a lot of work and I am grateful to Aaron for his contributions. Privacy Browser 1.9 also…