As the discussion is for the Android version of Privacy Browser, I don’t think the PC version should be discussed in this thread. Maybe due to a misunderstanding on my part, I thought the Android 4.x version would be based on Qt WebEngine, which is why I brought it up.
However, as it is based on AOSP WebView, it’s still subject to the same reasoning linked above by dngray:
However, I am not part of the team, and I’ll leave it up to them to decide whether or not to add Privacy Browser to their list of recommendations.
Personally, I think at the moment this is probably our main issue with Privacy Browser, because I think this is a big issue compared to Brave. I want to wait for Privacy WebView in your 4.x release, and then we’ll look at this again
For those who are interested, they can use WebView DevTools to enable site-per-process isolation for Android System Webview using the instructions at my website linked to above (the forum won’t let me post the same hyperlink twice, but in a code block it looks like https://www.stoutner.com/webview-devtools/). As far as can tell, this is the same as the site isolation that is used in Chromium, and presumably Brave unless they have further modified what Chromium is doing.
This isn’t nearly as comprehensive as the complete tab profile isolation I have implemented in Privacy Browser PC or that I intend to implement in Privacy WebView, which isolates tabs from each other, including all cookies, even if they have the same site loaded, but it is something.
This is what I wrote in the comments on my site about using WebView DevTools. “site-per-process is an interesting option. It enables Google’s site-isolation feature, which is off by default (it seems for RAM reasons, but there might be some other reason). At some point this will likely become the default WebView behavior. I am not sure I would recommend it generally as Google lists it as highly experimental, but I personally have not yet had any problems enabling it.” Perhaps it is time for me to make it an official recommendation.
Note that this is an OS wide change in WebView’s settings. It affects all apps that use WebView on a device, not just Privacy Browser.
There are several reasons, which I list in no particular order.
I dislike Chromium’s GUI. I think one of the advantages of Privacy Browser is that the entire GUI layer has been built from scratch in a much more functional way.
Chromium is bloated. Very bloated. Trying to remove all the junk from it would probably require more effort than building those components in Privacy Browser from scratch.
Most of the tracking code in Chromium is contained in the sections that are not part of WebView. If I were to create a rolling fork of Chromium, I would constantly have to check that Google hadn’t snuck in new tracking code that I hadn’t yet removed.
