First small step towards a true Tor Browser on Android.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [guardian-dev] Orfox: first step towards Tor Browser on Android Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 23:18:30 -0500 From: Nathan of Guardian nathan@guardianproject.info To: Guardian Dev guardian-dev@lists.mayfirst.org
Since Android 4.4 replaced the guts of the WebView component with Chrome, and there is no apparent way to set a proxy anymore (even through tricks like reflection), I decided to accelerate our move towards an entirely new approach to privacy-enhanced browsing.
I discovered two projects that provide a full standalone browser component that you can embed in an app.
ChromeView, based on Chromium, and very much a drop-in replacement for WebView: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview
GeckoView, Mozilla's own attempt to turn their browser engine into an Android developer component: http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2013/10/geckoview-embedding-gecko-in-your-...
I started with ChromeView, but got stuck just trying to get it to run. Both approaches require some strange use of putting .so and .pak binaries into asset folders and such. I don't entirely understand why yet.
I ended up getting the GeckoView project's GeckoBrowser sample running easily, and very quickly, started hacking in all the privacy-enhancing Firefox "about:config" preferences I know. All the SOCKS and HTTP proxying stuff works well, and I have even gotten to a fairly decent report back on ip-check.info in terms of cookies, referrals, user-agents, etc.
You can find the repo here, if you want to build and try yourself. No binaries posted yet: https://github.com/guardianproject/Orfox
I am aiming to do a release fairly quickly, at least for the Android 4.4 users who are currently left in a lurch.
Otherwise, if anyone wants to help build the best, most secure and privacy-enhancing mobile browser in the world, what we need to do from here is:
1) Start building the GeckoView library from source ourselves, and figure out which components we really need. It is very bloated, and the current APK is humongous.
2) Re-implement Orweb's various preferences into the new Orfox app, so that users can easily choose to turn on/off javascript, clear cookies, and so forth.
3) Connect with Mike Perry of Tor Project and start figuring out how the Firefox patches / modifications he makes for Tor Browser can be applied to the GeckoView builds.
Best, Nathan
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