aerium-browser/aerium-browser-core v152.0.7977.84-b153

Aerium 152.0.7977.84 (arm64, build 153)

on GitHub

Base

• Updated to Chromium 152.0.7977.84, by way of Vanadium 152.0.7977.84.0. The
  heading on this section previously said 152.0.7977.82, which was the version
  the desktop builds were on - this build was on 152.0.7977.75 and is now
  ahead of both.

Fixed

• The launcher icon is bigger and no longer sits on a white plate. The mark is
  a full-colour disc that is already its own tile, and it was being drawn small
  on a second, white one - a third of the area of the tile, with the rest of it
  white. It now fills the tile, on its own darkest navy rather than white, so
  there is no white left to read as a border. Reported in
  #13.
  The themed (monochrome) icon is deliberately unchanged: the system tints that
  one flat colour, so a mark filling the tile there just becomes a blob.
• Third-party autofill can no longer be switched off for a whole session by one
  unlucky moment at startup. Aerium delegates form filling to whichever autofill
  service you picked in Android, and the check for whether that service is
  usable was run exactly once, when the first tab opened. If Android had not
  finished bringing the service up by then, every tab for the rest of that run
  got the built-in engine instead - which in this build means no autofill at
  all, since the built-in passwords UI is not shipped. The only cure was
  restarting the browser. The check now re-runs as tabs are created, and only
  ever changes its mind in the direction of turning autofill on.

Fingerprinting

• window.queryLocalFonts() is off. The Local Font Access API returns every
  font installed on your machine in one call - the strongest font fingerprint
  there is - and one permission click hands over all of it. Firefox and Safari
  do not offer it at all and Chrome does not offer it on Android, so the
  desktop builds were the odd one out. Turn it back on at
  chrome://flags/#aerium-local-font-access if a design tool in your browser
  needs your fonts.
• New: audio fingerprint noise, on by default at
  chrome://flags/#aerium-audio-noise. The usual audio fingerprint builds an
  OfflineAudioContext, runs an oscillator through a compressor, renders it and
  hashes the samples - a value that is stable per device, survives clearing
  everything and is the same in Incognito. Aerium now scales what a page reads
  back by a fixed factor of about a hundredth of a percent, chosen once per
  site. Nothing you can hear changes, and none of these paths feeds playback.
• AudioContext.baseLatency is now rounded to a millisecond, the way
  outputLatency next to it already was. It is the audio hardware's buffer size
  divided by its sample rate, so at full precision it names the device.
• navigator.connection no longer reports whether you are on wifi or cellular,
  or which generation of cellular. Chromium wrote that mitigation and left it
  switched off.
• The canvas, measureText and getClientRects noise, the WebGL vendor/renderer
  spoof and the stripping of high-entropy client hints were already on here.
  navigator.hardwareConcurrency now reports 2 as well, which is the last
  piece the desktop builds had and this one did not.
• New: Report a different time zone, at
  chrome://flags/#aerium-time-zone. The time zone is one of the strongest
  signals a page can read without asking - it is stable, it survives clearing
  everything, and it is the same in Incognito. Turned on, each site is told a
  different one, chosen when the process for that site starts, so a site sees
  one consistent answer and two sites do not see the same one.
• It is off by default and it will make times wrong. A calendar, a booking site
  or a flight tracker will be out by the offset, with nothing on screen to
  explain why. That is the trade; make it deliberately.

Speed, memory and battery

• Cross-process subframes that are off-screen, or cover a small part of the
  page and have never been touched, now run at lower priority and half the
  frame rate. That is an advertising iframe, described by what it does rather
  than by a filter list.
• Background housekeeping is held back while a page you are looking at is
  loading or while you are typing, and released when neither is true.
• These were all written by Chromium and shipped switched off, waiting to be
  turned on from Google's servers. A browser that never talks to those servers
  never gets the message, so it is sent here instead.

Search

• DuckDuckGo is now the default engine, with Startpage second. Existing
  installs keep whichever engine they are already using.
• degoog (degoog.org) replaces the SearXNG entry, and Brave Search, Mojeek,
  Qwant and Ecosia join the list.

Secure DNS

• Settings › Privacy and security › Use secure DNS gains Mullvad and
  Mullvad's ad-blocking resolver, and finally shows Quad9 and NextDNS - the
  first was hidden behind a disabled feature flag, the second was restricted to
  the United States.
• Google Public DNS is gone from that menu. It was the one place in a
  de-googled browser still offering it.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash that took the whole browser down when you closed the last
  incognito tab using the overview button's "close tab" shortcut.
• The bottom bar now follows the pure black switch in incognito. It was the one
  surface still showing Chromium's dark grey.
• The search widget shows the Aerium logo rather than the launcher icon, so it
  no longer sits on a white tile.
• Access payment methods is gone from Privacy and security. Aerium ships no
  payment methods, so the switch offered to let sites check a store that cannot
  exist - and it was a live switch, not a display.

Full Changelog: v152.0.7977.64-b122...v152.0.7977.84-b153