Georg: Patrick Schleizer:
Hi,
XPCOM / XUL based add-ons will be deprecated in Firefox. [1]
I've searched trac, mailing list, irc logs... I know you are aware of that, but haven't found your plan forward. Is there already one?
What are your plans regarding tor-launcher? Will tor-launcher be ported over as Firefox WebExtension? Is that even possible?
We investigated what we would need for porting the extensions over to Webextensions a while ago in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17248.
The current plan has not changed: we still plan to port our extensions over to the Webextensions framework. It might need some upstream changes which we would provide with own patches but we'll see.
Georg
I had some discussions with Mark and Linda at the Tor Summit about the various non-browser use-cases for tor-launcher, especially as a means to allow the user to enable bridges/transports via GUI.
There is currently no GUI for users to select bridges/transports for non-XUL tor project applications. The move to WebExtensions does not seem to improve the situation.
I was wondering if this is still something being considered, even in the longer term?
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.
For background there had been a previously aborted effort to write a python-based tor-launcher clone:
https://www.whonix.org/blog/connection-bridge-wizard
Michael