Privacy Browser 3.6

This release fixes a bug that allowed buffered audio to continue to play when a tab was closed. There is a similar bug that I have a hard time reproducing that has similar symptoms, but includes the favorite icon for the closed tab being displayed on a remaining tab. If anyone is able to reproduce this bug reliably I would appreciate a comment on the bug report.

Privacy Browser now trusts user certificate authorities, which requires a special entry in the network_security_config.xml file on Android 7 (API 24) and newer. This is part of the fundamental premise of Privacy Browser, which is that the user is the ultimate authority on their own device. It is also important for trusting the Let’s Encrypt root certificate on older devices.

Data URLs can now be saved. Startpage uses data URLs for viewing images anonymously.

It does prevent another HTTPS request.

If there is enough room on the device and additional app bar icons are enabled, the DOM storage toggle has been replaced by an icon to open the bookmarks drawer.

Swiping to open the bookmarks drawer doesn’t work well with the newer gesture interface.

The Day and Night source HTML files for the Guide and About are now combined into one file and the icons have been converted to SVG files. As the number of translations rose, it was becoming increasingly time consuming to update all these files and make sure the Day and Night versions stayed in sync. As part of this process I also updated the Night theme to better match the default Android 11 Night color scheme. This also has the beneficial effect of lowering the size of the APK by at least a hundred kilobytes per language.

Thanks to all the translators and their hard work.

A bug was fixed that prevented importing backups from versions prior to 3.3. Another bug was fixed that caused custom headers to not be applied to links loaded from within the WebView. Single-tapping on an entry in the bookmarks activity now edits the bookmark instead of loading it in the main WebView activity. A couple of bugs were fixed that caused editing or other operations on bookmarks to operate on the wrong one if a number of bookmarks were selected and then some of them deselected.

About > Version now displays the memory usage. There are now also options to save, copy, and share About > Version.

System resources, including, I’m guessing, Android’s WebView, aren’t counted as being part of Privacy Browser for the purpose of these numbers.

When downloading files without a specified file name, Privacy Browser now guesses the file extension based on the Content-Type included with the header (if specified). This is similar to the saving of a data URL pictured above, where the file type is detected from the MIME type information to be a JPEG, and the default file name is set to be File.jpg.

The logcat is now cleared after every page load in Incognito Mode and, if configured, when Clear and Exit is run.

Begone!

A bug was fixed that caused pinned SSL certificates to be checked against the previous page’s SSL certificate on redirects. A Mastodon entry was added to About > Links. The intent filters were modified to make it easier for other browsers to share links with Privacy Browser. When deleting a domain settings in single-paned mode that was entered via the options menu, it now exits back to the main WebView activity instead of the domains ListView fragment. This is similar to the previous behavior when editing a domain setting from the options menu in single-paned mode. An icon was added to the header of the bookmarks Move to Folder dialog. A back arrow was added to the header of the bookmarks drawer. A bug was fixed that caused duplicate tabs to be created on restart in certain circumstances. The options icon theme was improved to match the new Day/Night theme. The version number is now included in the default file name when exporting settings. This makes it easier to identify later which schema version the settings file uses. The bookmarks context menu no longer flashes 0 when the last bookmark is deselected. The WebView is now resized to match the screen in full-screen browsing mode even if app bar scrolling is otherwise enabled. And domain settings are now cleared before opening a file.

Thiago Nazareno Conceição Silva de Jesus has provided a partial Brazilian Portuguese translation. Kévin L. updated the French translation. Bernhard G. Keller updated the German translation. Francesco Buratti updated the Italian translation. Jose A. León updated the Spanish translation. And the Russian translation was also updated.

This is the single largest release in terms of closed bug reports and feature requests since the beginning of Privacy Browser. Most of these were small items that kept getting bumped, and it feels good to finally get them cleaned up. The next release is going to focus on compatibility with Android’s new scoped storage and, hopefully, the removal of the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE dangerous permissions.