Hello!
Here comes the Tor Browser status report for December 2017. In that month the team made three releases, Tor Browser 7.0.11[1], 7.5a9[2], and 7.5a10[3].
The first two releases were mainly concerned with including new Tor versions (0.3.1.9 and 0.3.2.6-alpha respectively) and fixing Firefox security bugs.
Tor Browser 7.5a10 tested various fixes for inclusion in the upcoming Tor Browser 7.5. Most notably we sorted out why "Print to File" on Linux was broken[4][5], updated the security slider copy to get it more in line with what is shipped with Orfox on Android[6], and made sure CSS line-height does not reveal the user platform[7].
Non-release work focused on making progress on our remaining Sponsor 4 deliverables: getting Moat[8] and FPCentral[9] deployed. Alas, we did not finish those items in December but we plan to do so this month.
Moreover, we coordinated with the UX and the network team to get several usability improvements into Tor Browser, starting from a better circuit display[10] over redirecting users to .onion websites[11] to communicating the security state of .onions better[12].
On the mobile side we worked on including all the Orfox changes into our tor-browser.git repository.[13] That way we can easily build all flavors of Tor Browser from a single repository. Additionally, work got started to make Torbutton and Tor Launcher compatible with mobile requirements.
The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in December is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201712` keyword in our bug tracker.[14]
In January we plan to get Tor Browser 7.5 out, containing lots of improvements worked on in the past weeks and months. We'll continue working with the UX team on making progress on the above mentioned projects and plan to write a proposal for streamlining the security controls visible on the Tor Browser toolbar.
We plan to finally get FPCentral and Moat deployed and on our mobile side of things we hope to have all Orfox patches merged and work will be under way to adapt Torbutton and Tor Launcher to mobile requirements. A first proposal for Torbutton got already posted on the tbb-dev mailing list.[15]
All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201801` keyword in our bug tracker.[16]
Georg
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-7011-released [2] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-75a9-released [3] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-75a10-released [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/23970 [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/23016 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/21847 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/23104 [8] https://bugs.torproject.org/24689 [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/6119 [10] https://bugs.torproject.org/24309 [11] See: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012660.html and follow-up emails [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/23247 [13] https://bugs.torproject.org/19675 [14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [15] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-January/000723.html [16] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...