Hi!
In May we made an alpha release, Tor Browser 7.0a4[1], mainly to test the progress we made in our transition to Tor Browser based on Firefox ESR 52.
Highlights in this release were stability improvements, binding permissions to the first party domain in the URL bar, and neutering various new and old fingerprinting vectors.
For users with a 64bit Linux system Selfrando support got added which was one of our main security enhancements that lived in the hardened series previously. We'll evaluate this defense in our alpha series over the coming releases and hope we can ship it soon in our stable series as well.
Apart from doing release work we focused on getting Tor Browser 7.0 more stable, fixing our test suites[2], and on making our build system faster and more scalable. Switching our official nightly builds to using rbm, our new reproducible builds manager, got delayed, unfortunately, but we continued to fix bugs in it as we found them[3] and hope to get to the transition during June eventually.
The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in May is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201705 tag in our bug tracker.[4]
For June we plan to release Tor Browser 7.0 and move onto the Firefox ESR 52 train, finally. We expect some fallout from that and will address the major issues as fast as we can while we are finishing the remaining items for the 7.0 transition[5]. We plan to continue our build system improvements and get back to integrating our Panopticlick instance into our Q&A environment as a top priority[6]. Furthermore, we'll start upstreaming our newly written patches to Mozilla and plan to create new ones for outstanding tracking and fingerprinting defenses.
All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the TorBrowserTeam201706 tag in our bug tracker.[7]
Georg
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a4-released [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21982 [3] E.g. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22444 [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as... [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119 [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam20170...