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Mullvad Browser 13.5 released with letterboxing improvements and new installation options

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Mullvad Browser 13.5 is now available from the Mullvad Browser download page.

Following the changes introduced to new window sizes in Mullvad Browser 13.0, this release features welcome design changes to letterboxing, including new options to remember the last used window size and adjust the alignment of the letterbox.

New installation options are available for Windows, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. Better integration with these operating systems now allows Mullvad Browser to be set as the default browser.

What's new

Introducing Betterboxing

Letterboxing was introduced in Tor Browser 9.0 to prevent scripts from using the browser window size (more specifically, the inner window or viewport) as a metric to create a unique browser fingerprint. This technique works by standardizing the possible sizes across Mullvad Browser users, making it harder to single out individual users based on this metric.

Although the existing implementation of letterboxing works excellently to protect from fingerprinting, its visual design would often be misinterpreted by new users either as a bug with the browser or rendering issue with the website they're browsing.

Based on user's feedback, the following improvements have been made:

  • The visual design of the letterbox has been subtly polished, so as to avoid distracting you from the content you're actually trying to view.
  • A new letterboxing section, in General Settings, allowing to remember the last known window size and choose whether to align the letterbox to the top or middle of the browser window.
  • Double-clicking within the letterbox margin will snap the window size to the page content.

Now available in our package repositories for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora

Mullvad Browser is now available through our self-hosted repositories. Supported distributions and installation instructions can be found on our download page.

Each time a new Mullvad Browser release is made, they will be made available in these repositories.

New Windows installer

The Windows installer has been reworked, and by default Mullvad Browser will now be installed and integrated as any other Windows apps.

It is now possible to set it as your default browser!

Note: the previous installation mode, where the whole browser is contained in a single folder, is still available by selecting “Advanced” in the installer. It is now named “standalone installation”.

Browser profile and uninstallation

When you use install Mullvad Browser, a profile containing your preferences and bookmarks is created.

If you use the standalone installation, the profile and the whole browser is contained in the same folder. Deleting this folder will delete your profile at the same time.

If you install Mullvad Browser using the standard Windows installation, on Linux through the packages repositories or in macOS, your profile is created in your operating system's standard location.

This means that when you uninstall Mullvad Browser, your profile will not be deleted.

If you wish to uninstall Mullvad Browser and completely delete your profile, follow these steps:

  • launch Mullvad Browser
  • go to about:profiles
  • write down the root directory and the local directory paths
  • uninstall Mullvad Browser
  • delete the root directories and the local directories
  • empty your trash folder

What's next

Since its release one year ago, Mullvad Browser has been received as one of the most privacy-focused browsers by the privacy community.

Going forward, we want to make it possible for everyone to adopt Mullvad Browser as their default browser, and we will keep pushing the field by showing it is possible to put privacy first.

Send us your feedback

If there is something stopping you from using Mullvad Browser daily, we want to hear from you.

Contact us:

Your feedback, positive and negative, is very important, and we thank you for each test, review, comment and bug report.