Hi everyone,

During February the team has been working hard on finishing off work around improving Onion Service usability in Tor Browser as part of our work for Sponsor 27[1]. 

This work includes some exciting updates to HSv3 client authorization[2], including authorization key management[3] in Tor Browser. We have also been working on improvements to the way connection errors to onion services are presented[4][5] to a user when connection to an onion service fails[6][7]. Related to this, we have also been working on how we present warnings about self-signed certificates for .onion sites[8] and improving the url bar onion indicators[9]. We have also been working on a proof of concept to support human memorable addresses for onion services[10] by supporting .onions in HTTPSEverywhere[11]. 

 

We made two releases this past month: 9.0.5[12] and 9.5a5[13]. 

We have also moved closer to getting automatic nightly updates working and we hope to share some exciting news in this area soon.

Finally, we have started working on the transition away from Mozilla's ESR train and onto the Release train. As part of this work we have started to rebase Tor Browser patches onto mozilla-central and reviewing our testsuite. 

A few of us were at FOSDEM in Brussels where we gave a talk[14] sharing our plans for the year ahead for the Tor Browser Team.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam202020[15] keyword in our bug tracker.

All tickets on our radar for March can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam202003` keyword in our bug tracker.[16]

Thanks for reading!

Pili

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor27

[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30237 

[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19757

[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30022

[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30025

[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19251

[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23545

[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13410

[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32645

[10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30029

[11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28005

[12] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-905

[13] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a5

[14] https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/tor/

[15] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam202002

[16] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=assigned&status=merge_ready&status=needs_information&status=needs_review&status=needs_revision&status=new&status=reopened&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam202003&order=priority