Hello everyone!
We'll do the monthly reporting this time a bit different in covering the last two months instead of just the last one.
During this period we made three releases: Tor Browser 8.5.4[1], 9.0a4[2], and 9.0a5[3].
The first two were regular maintenance releases picking up latest security improvements in Firefox 60.8.0esr and adding a fundraising banner. 9.0a4 started to ship with aarch64 support for Android for the first time and due to a bug in our version codes[4] we needed to release 9.0a5 afterwards to get a roll out actually happening on Google Play.
It turns out supporting aarch64 properly is much harder than thought with an "old" Firefox ESR 60 branch, as we were and are still working on follow-up crashes on that platform which are now unfortunately affecting our stable users as well[5][6].
Besides that the whole team was essentially busy preparing our first alpha release based on Firefox 68 ESR and we are happy to announce that we are about to get it finally out (boklm is publishing the release while I am writing this status report). It's been a huge effort comprising rebasing all of our patches, adapting our toolchains across all platforms to new Firefox requirements and porting our extensions over to make them compatible with the new ESR series.
The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in July and August is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201907`[7] and `TorBrowserTeam201908`[8] keywords in our bug tracker.
For September we'll stabilize all aspects of Tor Browser 9: Above all we have reproducibility issues still open on many platforms[9][10][11] and most of our toolchains still need slight adjustments.[12] In addition to that a number of important issues besides toolchain and reproducibility improvements have already piled up for Tor Browser 9 and we plan to tackle them in the coming weeks as well. We have the `tbb-9.0-must-alpha` keyword in our bug tracker for those.[13] Additionally, for anyone following along at home, we have issues related to Firefox 68 ESR tagged with the `ff68-esr` keyword for easier assessment of the overall transition situation.[14]
Besides ESR transition work we hope to find time to work on the updater for Tor Browser nightly desktop builds.[15] Not having an updater for this channel is currently a major blocker from getting early adopters to test out our nightly builds and iterate quicker over new features and designs.
All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201909` keyword in our bug tracker.[16]
Georg
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-854 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-9.0a4 [3] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-9.0a5 [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/31260 [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/31140 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/31616 [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/31618 [10] https://bugs.torproject.org/31538 [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/31564 [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/30320 [13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~... [14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~... [15] https://bugs.torproject.org/18867 [16] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...