There appears to be a bug in Android’s Download Manager on Android 9 Pie that causes it to periodically crash and refuse to download files. New downloads will show up as queued, but will fail to download. I’m assuming that at some stage Google will release an update that fixes this, but in the meantime…

Privacy Browser 3.5 has been released. It switches to using Android’s relatively new Day/Night theme, which constitutes the largest UI change since the original Privacy Browser was released. This fixes a longstanding bug with alert dialogs in the dark theme, makes the app font colors easier on the eye in dark mode, and fights burn-in.…

Privacy Browser includes the following URL modifications, which are enabled by default. Each of these queries are stripped out as well as everything that follows them. An example URL looks like this: Privacy Browser strips out anything from the first ?utm_ forward, turning the URL into: Tracking Queries Privacy Browser blocks all the trackers listed…

From time to time I receive feedback from individuals regarding the layout of privacy browser on small screens. Usually this feedback relates to eliminating an element that they feel is not important enough to warrant the space utilization or diminishing the size of the fonts so that more information can fit on the screen. I…

As part of the Android, Google ships WebView, which is used to render HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is one of the standard views in Android Open Source Project (some others being TextView, EditText, Spinner, and ImageView). Privacy Browser uses WebView to render websites. If you do not have WebView on your system, Privacy Browser…

Privacy Browser has the ability for the user to select a custom search engine. The purpose of this page is to explain the search engine URL syntax. Privacy Browser expects to be able to append a search term to the search custom URL. What this URL looks like varies based on the search engine, but…

Privacy Browser 2.11 has been released. The major new feature is a Requests activity that shows how many requests were made and how many were blocked. Tapping on an individual request displays further details. The Requests entry in the navigation menu displays the number of blocked requests. I have written some information about how the…

Windows 11 has the option to run a Subsystem for Android, which is still fairly new but has reached the stage of general availability. Microsoft has partnered with Amazon to list apps from the Amazon Appstore in certain countries. There are a number of websites with instructions for setting up the Windows Subsystem for Android…

Privacy Browser Android 3.15.1 was released on 26 June 2023. The main purpose of the release was fixing a bug, introduced with duplicate bookmark folder names in 3.15, that caused the app to crash if a bookmark was moved to the home folder in the Bookmarks Activity. The rest of the items were ready to…