Programs that respect your privacy

Privacy Browser Android 3.13.1

Privacy Browser 3.13.1 was released on 9 January 2023. It contains a fix for a bug that manifested when the app theme and the OS theme were set to be different. In Android’s Day/Night theme design, an app always starts with the same theme as the OS. If the app desires the opposite theme, it then restarts into that mode. If not careful, this can cause a situation where two initial tabs are created but the browser only thinks there is one, which creates issues with bookmarks or searches happening in a different tab than desired. This bug had manifested a couple of years go and was fixed by canceling the AsyncTask that populates the blocklists if the app restarted to change the theme. However, with the 3.13 release a bunch of the old Java code was refactored to Kotlin, and, at the same time, the AsyncTask, which has been deprecated by Google, was replaced by a Coroutine. Coroutines don’t have the same cancellation method as AsyncTasks, so this bug resurfaced with the 3.13 release. This fix moves much of the initialization code into a section that doesn’t run if the app is going to restart to change the theme, which should permanently fix the bug going forward.

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