Programs that respect your privacy

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 this new method to Android 10-12L (APIs 29-32). But, at that time, Google prevented this method from working on older APIs. Since then, they have had a change of heart and this release extends full dark WebView support all the way back to the current minimum API. This should work on any device running Android 3.15 with a recent WebView (I tested this on a virtual device running Android 7.0 and WebView 114.0.5735.60). Because this fixes a feature that used to work and was temporarily broken, I felt 3.15 should be released as soon as possible. The other features I was originally intending to include in 3.15 have been pushed to 3.16.

Dark. Very dark.

The download snackbar now has a cancel action.

Begone!

The Domains activity now uses spinners (drop-down menus) instead of switches for the first entries. The spinners have three options: enabled, disabled, and system default. Using system default means that a user doesn’t have to update every domain setting entry if they change the system-wide setting for a particular item.

The bookmarks database and interfaces have been reworked to allow for duplicate folder names. Previously, because of a design limitation in how I created the original bookmarks database (back before I knew what I was doing) each bookmark folder had to have a unique name. Fixing this was a necessary step towards allowing the importing of bookmark HTML files from other browsers, which can contain duplicate folder names.

My wife tells me this is a necessary feature before she can use Privacy Browser PC.

A bug was fixed that caused a crash if the app was restarted while the pinned mismatched dialog was displayed. The underlying view pager code was refactored to use the newer ViewPager2 (instead of ViewPager) and FragmentStateAdapter (instead of FragmentPagerAdapter). The average user shouldn’t notice much difference beyond a default sliding animation between pages. However, it makes Android Studio happy and is something that, if not done, would likely cause a lot of problems down the road.

The next release is expected to be able to import and export bookmarks between other browsers in HTML format.

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