Programs that respect your privacy

Author: Soren Stoutner

  • Minimizing Privacy Browser’s Attack Surface

    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…

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  • Privacy Browser PC 0.4

    Privacy Browser PC 0.4 was released on 13 June 2023. A setting was added to enable or disable spatial navigation, which is the ability to navigate between links and input fields using the arrow keys. There is some discussion about this feature on Fosstodon. Given that some people find this feature annoying, I decided to…

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  • Privacy Browser Android 3.15

    Privacy Browser Android 3.15 was released on 12 June 2023. The major factor in the timing of this release was a desire to reenable the dark WebView on Android 7-9 (APIs 24-28). Privacy Browser Android 3.12 bumped the target API to 33, which changed the way the dark WebView worked. Privacy Browser Android 3.12.2 extended…

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  • Privacy Browser PC 0.3

    Privacy Browser PC 0.3 was released on 8 May 2023. The changelog is now included in the Handbook. The current domain settings icon is now displayed on Gnome and Xfce. Changes were made so that Privacy Browser PC will build on Guix. This lays the groundwork to run Privacy Browser in a container, which is…

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  • Privacy Browser Android 3.14

    Privacy Browser Android 3.14 was released on 6 May 2023. The domain settings spinner entries now have a highlighted background if they are not default. This change will eventually also be applied to the switches when they are converted to spinners. The terms whitelist and blacklist have been removed from the project. In English these…

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  • Privacy Browser Android 2.13

    Privacy Browser Android 2.13 was released on 29 October 2018. There is now an activity for exporting and importing settings and bookmarks. Both Privacy Browser and Privacy Browser Free use the same format, so backed up settings can be used to migrate between the two. There is a page that has more detailed information on…

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  • Privacy Browser PC 0.2

    Privacy Browser PC 0.2 was released on 17 April 2023. Work was done on this release to make sure Privacy Browser works well on GNOME. A crash was fixed that caused a segfault when downloading files on GNOME with local storage disabled. There are currently two file download mechanisms used by Privacy Browser. For downloads…

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  • If You Have Too Many Tabs, Sometimes They Disappear

    Programming for Android is an interesting experience. One of the most annoying things I didn’t anticipate is how Android will just kill your app whenever it wants and often for no good reason (it’s a little like doing battle with a chaos monkey). This has to do with what is called the Android Activity Lifecycle.…

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  • Saved Instance State

    Beginning with Privacy Browser 3.5, the app now saves and restores the instance state if killed in the background by the OS. For those who might not be aware of the abomination that is memory management on Android, I would point you to the picture below, which was taken from the official Android Lifecycle documentation.…

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  • Privacy Browser Android 3.13.4

    Privacy Browser Android 3.13.4 was released on 27 March 2023. The timing of this release was dictated by a fix to a problem introduced in 3.13.3. That release fixed a serious bug that sometimes caused the active tab to not be the current tab when the app was restarted, which meant that doing things like…

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