Hi everyone! Here is my status report for October 2022.
At the beginning of the month, I continued the unification of our desktop and Android patchset [0]. We had a few errors to correct, but now we use the same branch from tor-browser.git for all our platforms. One of the immediate consequences is that the Onion-Location header is now recognized on Android, too. Starting with Tor Browser 12.0a4, you can tell Tor Browser to prefer the .onion when possible [1].
After that, I worked on multi-lingual support for Tor Browser [2]. Starting with Tor Browser 12.0a4, we will ship only one package/installer for each architecture with all the languages we support. This change will make mirroring Tor Browser much easier, slightly decrease the time to build releases, and dramatically reduce the time to sign them. Of course, 36 additional languages increase the archive size. Therefore, we tried to remove files that were not actually used, like some images and fonts in the offline copy of the manual [3]. Eventually, we even reduced the final build sizes by some hundreds of kB!
For the rest of the month, I have been resolving several smaller problems, such as the bookmarks window not working on macOS [4], problems that the new tor-launcher implementation caused, improvements for the multi-lingual UX, typos, and more.
We are very excited about the coming 12.0, and we would love to hear any feedback from you on the latest alphas [5]]!
Thanks, Pier
[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41308 [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41394 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/17400 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41... [5] https://www.torproject.org/download/alpha/