Mark Smith:
On 1/10/17 5:27 AM, anonym wrote:
Michael Carbone:
The move away from XUL could be an opportunity to address this by building a more generic solution that could be used by the increasing number of tor-powered applications/environments, such as onionshare, ricochet, tails, qubes, subgraph, etc., in addition to tor browser and tor messenger.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday during our Tor Browser team meeting on #tor-dev.
The tight integration of Tor Launcher within the browser has been a big win for both user experience and for maintenance of the launcher and configuration code.
Fully understood.
Our current plan for Tor Browser is to migrate Torbutton and Tor Launcher to the WebExtensions APIs, extending and adding new APIs as needed (and hopefully Mozilla will help us). See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17248.
Yeah, I've seen it. Like I said in the other sub-thread, this would still work for Tails if there was an option to emulate "standalone XUL application"-mode by simply suppressing the browser window.
Indeed! In Tails we have a ticket and blueprint tracking something like this:
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/10491 https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/network_connection/Of course, our configuration tool would also include OS-level stuff, but I guess SubgraphOS/Qubes/Whonix would also be interested in that. At least it'd be nice if code could be shared (e.g. we can import the Tor configuration parts via a module and use the same in our application). Bonus if it's written in Python, building on the ecosystem of Tor-related project we already have there (primarily stem).
I expect that some Tails people attending the Tor dev meeting in March might be interested in discussing this.
I think it is definitely worthwhile to talk more about this.
Let's do it then!
If code cannot be shared, at least UI designs can be.
Absolutely! If it is not already stated as a goal that this new configuration tool would design the parts about Tor configuration the same way as Tor Launcher (or whatever) does for the vanilla Tor Browser.
It is also worth noting that Yawning created a new launcher/updater for Linux as part of his Sandboxed Tor Browser Project (it uses go, Gtk+ 3, and libnotify). https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowser/Sandbox/Linux
Interesting, but I wonder how much of this launcher that is about setting up the sandboxes -- my fear is that it simply is designed for something else than what we want. Any way, I haven't looked at it, I'm just speculating. :)
However, the need for a standalone Tor Launcher-like application is not limited to Tails. Clearly Whonix wants one since Patrick started this topic, and I could see e.g. OnionShare, and non-mozilla bundles (that cannot use your WebExtension) wanting to use something like that. It feels a bit odd to me if they would depend on e.g. Tor Browser, which currently is the case for e.g. OnionShare.
Cheers!