Privacy Browser 2.15.1 has been released. It is an emergency bug fix release that resolves a crash when opening a secondary activity on some devices. Beginning with Privacy Browser 2.15, the drawer header padding is adjusted for phones with notches. The adjustment is calculated based on the height of the status bar every time the…

From time to time I receive suggestions from people that I change Privacy Browser to use Mozilla’s GeckoView instead of Android’s WebView to render pages. Instead of responding to each of these communications individually, I thought it helpful to write a general post covering this subject and explaining why I am not now considering doing…

Privacy Browser 2.15 features the removal of Google’s Ad Consent library from the free flavor. This was added in Privacy Browser 2.10 to comply with the GDPR. It was never included in the standard flavor. The Ad Consent library performed two functions. The first of which was to determine if a user was located in…

Privacy Browser 2.15 has been released. A bug was fixed when changing user agents using domain settings. Previously, in some circumstances, when changing user agents it would force a refresh of the current page, which would interrupt the loading of the new page. Privacy Browser now adapts the height of the drawer layouts to account…

Privacy Browser 2.14 has been released. There are now encrypted import and export options. The password option uses standard Android tools to encrypt the file. A random salt is added to the password, which is then SHA-256 hashed and truncated. The export database is then encrypted using AES 256 GCM. Unfortunately, password encryption is not…

With the release of Privacy Browser 2.12, the default homepage and search engine has been switched to Searx.me. This only applies to new installs of Privacy Browser. Existing users who upgrade will keep whatever their current settings are until they manually change them. The default Tor homepage and search engine has been changed to http://ulrn6sryqaifefld.onion/,…

Privacy Browser 2.12 has been released. The default homepage and search engine has been changed from DuckDuckGo to Searx. This is a significant enough change that I have written a separate post explaining why the decision was made. This change only effects new installs. Existing installs will maintain their current settings unless updated by the…

There is a bug with recent versions of Orbot (16.0.2-RC-1, 16.0.5-RC-2-tor-0.3.4.9) that causes HTTP proxying to fail (HTTPS proxying works just fine). That means that webpages that begin with https:// will load just fine but webpages that begin with http:// will not. I have filed a bug report with the developers of Orbot. Those who…

Privacy Browser 2.10 has been released. Uploading of files is now enabled for Lollipop and newer (API >= 21). Initially I thought this would require the Read Storage permission, but it turns out that beginning in Android Lollipop (API 21) Google added a system file chooser API to WebKit. This allows the browser to request…

Privacy Browser 2.9 has been released. The major change is that the write storage permission has been added as was previously announced in the roadmap. This allows downloads to be stored in the public download directory, and will also allow for a number of other planned features, like the import and export of settings. It…