Privacy Browser Android uses Android’s WebView to render web pages. WebView provides fairly limited controls compared to the upstream Chromium source. However, there are small set of user-configurable controls that Google has baked into WebView. Users can tweak these controls using WebView DevTools. If you are using a pre-stable channel (Beta, Dev, or Canary) there […]

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 3.14 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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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. […]

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 […]

Privacy Browser Android 3.13.3 was released on 13 March 2023. It contains a fix for the current tab not always being the active tab after restart. When Privacy Browser is stopped in the background because the OS needs the RAM, it stores the current state of each WebView in an app bundle called the SavedInstanceState. […]

After testing it for a while and finding no downsides besides a personally unnoticeable increase in RAM usage, I have decided to recommend that users enable the site-per-process WebView DevTools flag, which can increase security when malicious JavaScript compromises the rendering process. There are more details on the WebView DevTools page.