Hi everyone! Here is my status report for October 2024.
Ten days ago, we finally released Tor Browser 14.0 after several months of work on it 🎉 [0]. Therefore, in the first weeks of October, I mostly fixed minor bugs/details and tried to help my colleagues resolve other problems for the big release. I also spent a considerable amount of time doing QA. While doing it, I created new resources to make the QA process faster. I added all of them to the tests for self-signed HTTPS Onion Sites I created a while ago [1].
I also restarted my upstream effort. I think the upstreaming of Bug 1556002 [2] and Bug 1923264 [3] were the fastest I have ever had 😄. I also tried to start a conversation about ignoring `content-disposition: attachment` in some cases [4], but that will need more work downstream first.
After the release, I returned to working on issues we didn't want to rush for the stable, such as moving FontConfig's fonts.conf [5]. While doing so, I also found a compatibility problem between the modern Python version we self-compile to be able to build Firefox and the legacy OpenSSL version we still have in our old build environment [6]. I fixed it by downgrading Python to 3.9.20, which is still officially supported by the PSF and the various build systems we use. That was the less-impacting solution, but not the only possible one. Also, we really needed to fix it quickly, as it would have prevented us from building 14.0.1.
Currently, I am working on fixing the "Proxy server refuses connection" problem that some Android devices (mostly Samsung phones) show [7]. I think a workaround would be to return to TCP sockets for the SOCKS connections. I prefer Unix domain sockets, as they can be used only by the browser with our configuration, whereas TCP sockets will be available to other apps as well, which is a linkability concern. If you have an Android device with this behavior and think you can help debug it, please consider commenting on that GitLab issue [7]. With this effort, we will also get closer to solving an 11-year-old issue, a new record for me 😄 [8].
Finally, I did the usual maintenance work. I rebased our browsers (the 128-based stable and the 115-based legacy channel) and started the new branches for the 14.5 series. I also prepared the 14.0.1 Tor Browser stable release and built it.
Best, Pier
[0] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-140/ [1] https://onion-tests.pierov.org/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1556002 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1923264 [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1923368 [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43140 [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41... [7] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42714 [8] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-launcher/-/issues/10439