[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, January 2024

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for January 2024.

For most of the month, I worked on the Windows installer for Mullvad 
Browser [0]. This also involved working on NSIS. I finally succeeded in 
building it with Clang [1], so Rust remains the only project requiring 
GCC on Windows. Then, I refactored our existing Windows installer [2].
At this point, I could write a brand new installer for Mullvad Browser. 
It hasn't been reviewed yet, and it will need some polishing. However, 
it will help me to deal with the default browser feature, which I've 
just started investigating [3].

In addition to that, I helped with the January releases. I rebased 
stable and alpha onto Firefox 115.7.0esr and prepared the stable releases.
At the moment of publishing, the Play Store rejected our x86 APK because 
it exceeded the 100MB threshold [4]. Therefore, I patched our build 
system to repack the APK using 7-zip, which offers better compression 
also for zip files. We saved around 4MB, enough to get the APK approved.
Long-term alternatives could be Android App Bundles [5], which would 
force us to switch to Play App Signing, or APK Expansion files [6]. But 
we are trying to remove more unused assets first.

Another Android problem I worked on was the incompatibility of 13.5a3 
with API < 26 devices because I had used some NIO API.
Finally, I resolved some issues with spoof English and reviewed a pair 
of big merge requests about S96 deliverables.

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-browser/-/issues/200
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40606
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41065
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-browser/-/issues/80
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41066
[5] https://developer.android.com/guide/app-bundle
[6] https://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion-files