Privacy Browser Android 3.18

Privacy Browser Android 3.18 was released on 27 May 2024. Initially I was planning to wait for the implementation of fine grained cookie management for the 3.18 release, but a user discovered a bug that caused the file picker to not be able to select desired files on some websites. Being able to upload files is such a basic function of a web browser that I considered not being able to do it under certain circumstances to be significant enough to merit an immediate release. I believe this bug only affected websites that included lists of allowed file uploads that parse to more than one MIME category (image, text, audio, video, etc.). As such, it probably wasn’t encountered by very many users. Which is why it had not been previously reported, even though it has existed in Privacy Browser Android for a long time. But for those few users it did affect, it was exceedingly annoying. The fix is to allow uploading of all file types, ignoring whatever restrictions the website requests. This is in line with how other browsers handle it and appears to be the best solution to work around limitations in Android’s intent system that passes requests between the browser and the file picker.

The logcat has been colorized and a search feature has been added. This makes it easier to find crashes in the logcat.

The screenshot on the right was taken before the search functionality was added, so it doesn’t include the search action visible in the screenshot on the left.

Bookmark favorite icons can now be selected from the file system.

I wonder if anyone will actually use this. But it was fairly easy to do and adds feature parity with Privacy Browser PC.

The code that disabled the delete icon while a domain is being deleted and reenables in when the database command has finished processing was improved. A crash was fixed that was caused when an HTTP authentication dialog was displayed while Privacy Browser was in the background. The color attribute code was cleaned up and replaced with direct color calls. A problem with the color of the text of the first button in View Headers in night mode was fixed by hard coding the color as white instead of trying to detect it based on the theme, which caused an undocumented race condition in the Android platform.

It’s always the weird ones that get you.

The size of the navigation drawer toggle hit box was increased to make it easier to tap on. The change in 3.17 to decrease the wasted padding had the unintended consequence of shrinking the hit box to the visible aspects of the icon.

Favorite icons are now updated when navigating history, including in SSL certificate dialogs. The code path for navigating history was unified, preventing different behavior when navigating history by disparate methods.

The minimum API has been bumped to 26 (Android 8.0) to match the minimum API currently supported by WebView updates.

The focus of effort continues to be on Privacy Browser PC, which will shortly release version 0.6 with filter list support. But updates for Privacy Browser Android should continue to trickle out.