Author Archives: Soren Stoutner

Privacy Browser 3.2 has been released. The default search engine and homepage have been changed to Startpage. This is a big enough change that I have written a separate post explaining it. Recent changes in WebView broke proxying though Orbot, which is now fixed. However, this only fixes HPPTS proxying. HTTP proxying is still broken […]

Last year, with the release of Privacy Browser 2.12, I changed the default search engine and homepage from DuckDuckGo to Searx. With the release of Privacy Browser 3.2, I am changing it again. Of all the search engines I have seen, I like the structure and philosophy of Searx the most. It is open source […]

Every piece of software as complex as a browser that receives unsanitized information from the internet will eventually be compromised. How often that happens and how damaging the compromises are can be mitigated through a careful design process. Some information about decreasing the damage that a compromise can inflict is discussed on the Core Privacy […]

Privacy Browser 3.1 has been released. This adds a much requested close tab button to the app bar. If there is only one tab, this button will run Clear and Exit. This release fixes a problem with elements on a web page not being able to scroll left and right that was caused because the […]

Back in December 2018, with the release of Privacy Browser 2.15, I removed Google’s Ad Consent Library from the free flavor of Privacy Browser. At the time, the text of the ad consent dialog was updated to reflect that these ads were set to be non-personalized, but that the user was no longer identified as […]

Update: It turns out that there was a change in the WebView commands for proxying beginning in WebView 74. The fix is included in Privacy Browser 3.2. Several recent versions of WebView have had problems with proxying. This has manifested most recently with WebView 74.0.3729.136 on Android Marshmallow (version 6.0, API 23) or newer. When […]

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 […]

Privacy Browser 3.0.1 has been released. This is a bugfix release to correct a couple of serious bugs in the tabbed browsing interface that couldn’t wait for 3.1. A couple of other items were also added to release because they were ready to go in time and resolved less serious bugs. Because some people don’t […]

Anyone who has been following these posts for a while has noticed the running thread of limitations caused by Android’s WebView, which is why the 4.x series is going to include a forked version called Privacy WebView. While developing tabbed browsing I discovered that first-party cookies are enabled/disabled by app, while third-party cookies are enabled/disabled […]