Privacy Browser Android

The fact that this is happening for both Privacy Browser (Android WebView based) and Fennec (Firefox based) is indicative to me that the program actually making these requests is probably some OS component that is interacting with the browser rather than the browser itself.

If you would like to investigate this further, I would recommend posting a copy of About > Version from inside Privacy Browser. Also, please indicate if you are using a custom ROM.

My Privacy Browser version is 3.19.2 (with WebView 131.0.6778.200). I am using LineageOS custom ROM.

My device is officially supported by LineageOS so this is very shocking to me. Also the ad domains here contains lots of .jp and .co.jp domains, but I'm not browsing from a Japan IP, so I believe this is not fully tailored to my system. Very puzzling.

The fact that this is happening for both Privacy Browser (Android WebView based) and Fennec (Firefox based) is indicative to me that the program actually making these requests is probably some OS component that is interacting with the browser rather than the browser itself.

Yes, I'm starting to think that this is the case. But can you reproduce my issue successfully? Because then I could confirm it is not a "me-issue". And what kind of component do you think could it be interacting?

This is probably the only site that I discovered this issue. If you know any sites (that are full of ads) you can also let me test it.

I also suspect it could be some kind of DNS prefetch mechanism, but it's still the same on Fennec after I changed those "prefetch" related options. Though, Firefox likes to hardcode many questionable configurations and no mobile folks cares enough to neutralize them.

Based on the following discussion, I would guess that this is a DNS prefech, not an HTTP prefetch.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/NZ5cGTR62FQ

Meaning that the current version of Android System WebView has probably been programmed to prefetch the DNS A and CNAME records for all the links on a website, even if it waits to make actual HTTP requests until a user taps on the link.

This paragraph from the link is interesting:

That appears to be the right thing. This component is not currently used in WebView because the point in Chrome where it gets hooked up
 and enabled seems to be in src/chrome/browser/net/predictor.{h,cc} and no code from src/chrome is used in WebView. To add this support
 to WebView you'd need to wire up and enable it from somewhere in src/android_webview, ideally without duplicating existing code from
 src/chrome too much (it may be that this would require some refactoring to move more of the predictor implementation to a component,
 as components are allowed to be shared between webview and chrome, but I haven't looked at the code in great detail). I don't know if
 there are design docs for this feature.

There no longer seems to be a chrome/browser/net/predictor.cc in the Chromium source code, so it has likely moved somewhere else.

By the way, researching this led me to find documentation about disabling pulling requests from the cache, which is something I didn't know I could do. Feature #1265: Disable using the web cache.

Thank you.

But approximately when will 4.x be ready?

And is it trivial to install and use the Privacy WebView? (like I could just install it easily as a regular package)

The 4.x series will probably not be released until I can hire several more people to work on Privacy Browser full time, which means it probably needs to generate somewhere along the lines of $1,000,000/year.

https://www.stoutner.com/category/financial-reports/