Programs that respect your privacy

Privacy Browser 3.2

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.

The new default homepage.

Recent changes in WebView broke proxying though Orbot, which is now fixed. However, this only fixes HPPTS proxying. HTTP proxying is still broken due to a bug in Orbot itself.

A new blocklist named UltraList was created to complement EasyList.

UltraList

A bug was fixed that sometimes caused a blocklist to prevent the loading of the main URL. This would result in a blank page and the blocklists showing nothing was blocked.

The Facebook URL modification was updated to include ?fbadid= and &fbadid=.

We don’t need no stinking IDs in our URLs.

A problem was fixed that manifested when domain settings enabled or disabled JavaScript while navigating history. Another bug was fixed that caused some videos to not disable the screen timeout when in full screen video mode.

The close and add tab buttons now display visual feedback when they are touched. As part of this change, the horizontal touch sensitive area of the button was expanded to match the height of the tab. Previously, only the height of the actual icon was touch sensitive. This makes the buttons easier to tap.

New tabs opened from a context menu are now loaded in the background. This better matches the experience on a desktop browser, where new tabs opened from the right-click context menu are typically loaded in the background. It aligns with the workflow of scrolling through a webpage and opening a number of tabs via the context menu to be read at a later time.

The link contextual menu. There are variations for images, images that are also links, and email addresses.

It is now possible to save a webpage as an image.

Save as Image.
The saved image.

Full screen browsing mode was improved by reentering full screen mode after the keyboard or other floating elements are displayed.

The View Source request headers were updated to match the current format used by WebView. Note that WebView uses Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate while View Source must use Accept-Encoding:gzip due to limitations in HttpUrlConnection.

Look at all that unnecessary leaking of language information.

A number of crashes were fixed, which should make Privacy Browser more stable. Thanks to all those who submitted bug reports.

An updated German translation was provided by Bernhard G. Keller, Italian by Francesco Buratti, and Spanish by Jose A. León. The Russian and Turkish translations were also updated.

The 3.2 release was originally going to include support for I2P, but I decided to release early because of the importance of the Orbot fixes. I intend to work on I2P support for the next release.

Last updated


3 responses to “Privacy Browser 3.2”