November 2018 - tbb-dev - lists.torproject.org

Nightly rebase experiment proposal
by Arthur D. Edelstein 03 Feb '20

03 Feb '20

Hi everyone, Here's a plan for experimenting with moving Tor Browser from ESRs to mozilla-central. Why try this? There are several reasons I can think of: * There is no mobile Firefox ESR. In order to keep mobile Tor Browser secure, we would either need to constantly monitor for security fixes and apply backports. It will be simpler to follow the Mozilla release cycle. * Tor Browser will receive all security patches and security features from Mozilla, not simply those deemed important enough to backport to the last ESR. * Closer collaboration between Mozilla and the Tor Browser team will be possible, because everyone will be focused on the same codebase. For example, non-urgent patches can land directly on mozilla-central, bypassing tor-browser.git altogether, and those patches will be deployed to Tor Browser faster than they would have been on an ESR-only schedule. Mozilla will provide expert review of patches. Also, some non-urgent patches by Tor Browser may be written by Mozilla engineers. * The Tor Browser development process will be smoother and more gradual. Instead of rebasing and patch-fixing sprints ahead of each ESR, we can automatically rebase patches every night, and fix any patch whenever its rebase fails. (The total rebase effort should be approximately the same as before.) * Patches that frequently break because they live on "hot code" can be identified and uplifted. * We'll need to continuously monitor the mozilla codebase for new features that could harm privacy. That's potentially difficult, but by focusing on Mozilla's current work, we can hopefully stop patches that affect privacy before they land. Here's how I envision the new rebase process: * An automated script rebases all tor browser patches every night against mozilla-central, mozilla-beta, mozilla-stable and mozilla-esr. An email alert will be sent if the rebase of any patch fails. (I have a prototype script that does the basic rebasing -- it found that ~40/140 patches from our ESR-52 branch could be auto-rebased onto mozilla-central without any intervention.) * Any failed patches will need to be manually fixed up promptly so that the automated rebase can resume. * Diagnostic Tor Browser bundles will be built against the latest rebase branches. We can also run regression tests. So how do we ramp up this experiment? 1. 2018-1-1 to 2017-2-22: Rebase tor-browser.git patches manually on top of Firefox 59-beta. (We have to do this anyway.) 2. 2017-2-22 to 2018-3-13: Activate a script that rebases Tor Browser patches nightly onto mozilla-(central, beta, stable, esr). 3. 2018-03-13 to 2018-05-07: Create nightly Tor Browser bundle builds based on nightly rebases. At this point, we can evaluate whether we would like to transition to releasing Tor Browser alphas based on the mozilla-beta branch. Switching Tor Browser stable to mozilla-stable can happen sometime after that. How does this sound? Interested to hear what you think. Thanks, Arthur

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Meeting for planning our future sandboxing work (Fri 11/30, 1900UTC)
by Georg Koppen 29 Nov '18

29 Nov '18

Hi! We thought about planning a bit our future sandboxing work before the Mozilla All-Hands week. We'll have a meeting about that tomorrow, Fri 11/30 1900UTC in #tor-meeting, on the OFTC IRC network. Please join if you are interested! Georg

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Re: [tbb-dev] [tor-project] Tor Browser team meeting notes, 12 Nov 2018
by intrigeri 15 Nov '18

15 Nov '18

Hi, > tjr: > [...] > * Other: I am considering writing a tbb-dev proposal to increase the > max content processes from 4 to 999. This would increase memory > consumption, especially for users with a lot of tabs. It would provide > some small level of tab isolation at the process level, but only for new > tabs opened, not tabs reused. The security gain contains a lot of "Well > if the user does this, things are kinda better, but if they do this > they're no better." So not sure if it's useful, the main draw is that > it's a 4 character patch, so easy to do, just difficult to decide one. FWIW, in Tails we had to decrease dom.ipc.processCount to 2 on systems with less than 3GB of RAM: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1066789#c5

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Web Extension Process
by Tom Ritter 13 Nov '18

13 Nov '18

I checked on the Web Extension process preference, and here was the response: https://mozilla.logbot.info/webextensions/20181113#c15605205 Seems like it would be prudent to plan on needing to fix this by the next ESR. -tom

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