Privacy Browser 2.17 has been released. The app bar now scrolls off the screen when the WebView is scrolled down and reappears when the WebView is scrolled up. This was an important prerequisite in preparation for tabbed browsing, as the tab interface will take additional screen real estate that would be bothersome if it couldn’t be hidden by scrolling. App bar scrolling can be disabled in the settings for those who do not want it. The full screen browsing options were simplified to work with app bar scrolling.

There is a new Logcat Activity. This displays the logs that Privacy Browser can collect about itself without needing any special permissions. It is useful for figuring out what caused a crash. Depending on the cause and the permissions needed to see the information, not all crashes will be displayed in the Logcat. The screenshot below shows a crash caused because Android’s over-aggressive memory management decided to wipe out one of the blocklists while it was being used.

Users can now specify the URL and which browser to open when creating a desktop shortcut.

The link and image context menus now have options to open directly with an app or another browser.

Default apps can now be set from the open with app chooser.

A bug was fixed that caused Privacy Browser to apply URL syntax highlighting to text a user was typing if they started typing it while a website was loading. Another bug was fixed that would display the pinned mismatch dialog if the IP addresses were pinned and they had not yet been acquired by Privacy Browser when the website finished loading. Because the IP addresses usually were populated by the time the dialog was fully displayed, this would show a pinned mismatch dialog with no mismatching information.

Google’s Android Support Library, which is no longer maintained, was replaced with the new and shiny AndroidX libraries. This is basically a rename on Google’s part. These libraries backport newer Android features so they work on older Android devices, as we all know how miserable most OEMs are at updating Android after a device is released.

We have a new German translator, Bernhard G. Keller, who updated all the German strings for this release and will be working on the Guide and About for the next release. Progress is also being made towards the first full Turkish translation. The Italian translation was updated by Francesco Buratti. The Spanish translation was updated by Jose A. León. And the Russian translation was updated.

Unless there is a critical bug that needs to be fixed, this is the last release in the 2.x series. The 3.x series will begin with the much anticipated addition of tabbed browsing.