Hello!
Some of you might have seen that our Tor Browser nightly builds for desktop switched to Firefox 78 ESR recently. We've been waiting with a more or less official announcement until we got our nightly setup into a more stable shape, but believe now is a good time to call for wider testing.
If you already were on the nightly channel before reading this mail you have likely already got an update to Tor Browser using ESR 78[1], but alas only one, due to a bug we overlooked[2]. So, the easiest way to solve that particular problem is to save your bookmarks and start over again with a fresh nightly build.[3] Any nightly build after August 2, 2020 should be good.
For those of you not already being on the nightly channel and willing to test the latest Tor Browser work, just grab the latest nightly[3] and enjoy the auto-updater to keep you up-to-date[1], which makes this bleeding-edge series so more useful.
Please report bugs as you find them, ideally in our bug tracker[4], but we are happy to receive them via other channels, too.
We currently plan to release a first Tor Browser 10 alpha based on Firefox 78 ESR in about two weeks from now, making sure the toolchains[5] are in the shape we want them to be for the stable release and the audit for potential proxy bypass bugs is done[6] (and issues encountered are addressed). Those two items are the hard blockers for that first alpha but it goes without saying that we try to squeeze as many bug fixes as we can into that alpha as well. :)
As I indicated at the beginning of this mail the above plan and status update is only for our desktop Tor Browser. For mobile we are still busy to get the switch to Fenix going and announcements for (wider) testing of Tor Browser on that platform will be sent out separately.
Thanks, Georg
[1] With the caveat that we currently only provide auto-updates for en-US, de, es-ES, fr, and ru locales. [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [3] http://f4amtbsowhix7rrf.onion/tor-browser-builds/ [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/users/sign_in [5] See: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/34... and child bugs for issues we are aware of right now [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40017