Hi everyone! Here is my status report for November 2022.
At the beginning of the month, I attended the Reproducible Build 2022 Summit in Venice [0]. I discovered a lot of new stuff there, and hopefully, we might apply some to Tor Browser, too.
Then, for the rest of the month, I mostly worked on refinements to Tor Browser 12.0 series. One of the most important features I have worked on is improving the experience with the multi-lingual builds. For example, I have implemented a notification to explain to the user why Tor Browser chose that language, with a button to go directly to the language preferences [1]. I have also fixed a few bugs introduced by the tor-launcher refactor [2][3]. I also managed to get yet another patch upstreamed to Firefox [4].
I had another important task, too: reviewing the profile files with our custom Firefox configuration [5]. I removed some old settings, added new ones, and tried to add missing links to our bug tracker for the ones that we already had. I hope this will help us with future documentation and review work.
Finally, I helped to prepare some releases and to verify the reproducibility of the ones we released.
We should be very close to 12.0 becoming stable: we are very excited about it, and we would love to get any feedback. So, please, consider downloading [6] the fifth alpha of 12.0 (we are publishing it later today) and giving it a test ride 😄️.
Thank you very much, Pier
[0] https://reproducible-builds.org/events/venice2022/ [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41378 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41436 [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41429 [4] https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D161264 [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40783 [6] https://www.torproject.org/download/alpha/