Privacy Browser 1.15 has been released. A user submitted a bug showing how some web pages, like Twitter, store information in a cache that isn’t deleted through the normal cache deletion commands. It turns out that WebView has a secret cache stored in /data/data/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/ app_webview/Service Worker/CacheStorage. I submitted a bug to Google requesting an API…

Privacy Browser 1.14.1 fixes a bug that caused Privacy Browser to crash on some websites when ad blocking was enabled.

Privacy Browser 1.16 has an integrated ad blocker based on pgl.yoyo.org’s ad server list. It is enabled by default. Ha Duy Trung wrote an interesting guide to ad blocking in WebView, which was what initially pointed me to pgl.yoyo.org as the source of a good ad server list, although my code implementation ended up being substantially different than…

Update With the release of Privacy Browser 2.9, most of the following information is now obsolete.  Privacy Browser 2.9 includes the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission.  On devices running Android Lollipop (API 22) and older and on devices running Android Marshmallow (API 23) and newer that allow the storage permission, downloads will now be saved in the public…

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…