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October 2024

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PieroV's Monthly Status Report, September 2024
by Pier Angelo Vendrame 01 Oct '24

01 Oct '24

Hi everyone! Here is my status report for September 2024. I dedicated a consistent part of this month to various tasks to fix regressions we got after migrating to Firefox 128 or for refinements. I started by re-implementing our search engine customization. Upstream themselves reworked their configuration, so I ended up reverting our previous patch and implementing a new one [0]. While at it, I removed some search engines we used to bundle by default, such as Yahoo and Twitter. I also re-implemented the functionality to send DuckDuckGo searches through its HTML-only version when running at the safest security level [1]. After doing this for Tor Browser, I wrote similar patches for Mullvad Browser [2]. After that, I worked on the Android part of our build system. I removed the Lox WASM blob [3], which isn't currently used on Android. This allowed us to ship x86 APKs on the Play Store again. Then, I simulated a release build to check they don't fail when we're close to the release period. However, they didn't work, and I had to fix our dependency list [4]. Also, I fixed single-arch Android test builds [5]. Then, I focused on a disk leak problem. Firefox downloads and opens some formats in the browser without asking for confirmation by default when the server sends them as attachments. There's a preference for force-inlining PDFs (browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline), but it doesn't work on other formats. Therefore, I extended that functionality, but I'm not completely satisfied. In our issue [6], I documented all the various problems we still have. However, I will need more time and some help from upstream to provide a better fix. I also went back to one of my passions: fonts. I investigated the differences between having and not having our custom font configuration on Linux [7], and I thought of some strategies for 14.5, as we are too late for 14.0. For now, I created some font aliases to improve compatibility and updated our bundled fonts. In addition to that, I helped with releasing. I rebased our browsers onto Firefox 115.16.0esr and 128.3.0esr. Also, I prepared 13.5.3 and 13.5a10. The latter was an unplanned alpha release from a legacy branch to test the watershed update procedure, which we need to provide alternative updates for legacy platforms (Windows 7/8 and macOS up to 10.14). Finally, I attended the Reproducible Build Summit in Hamburg [8]. I joined the group that focused on writing documentation for repro build beginners. Best, Pier [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests… [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42617 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-browser/-/issues/328 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests… [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4… [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42220 [7] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41799 [8] https://reproducible-builds.org/events/hamburg2024/

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