Hello!

In February the Tor Browser team made two releases, 8.0.6 and 8.5a8, mainly to pick up a security bugfix for Firefox[1].

Apart from that we worked on four major projects during the month:

1) Getting Tor Browser for Android ready for the next big alpha milestone: we got pluggable transport support working[2] and are currently finalizing our new UI[3]. With a bit of luck we can even test the enhanced Tor Onion Proxy Library (TOPL) in our next alpha as well, which will finally allow us to drop Orbot as a dependency.[4]

2) Integrating Tor Launcher into tor-browser[5]: this is basically done and awaiting review and further testing in upcoming alphas. The tighter integration into the browser code itself will allow us an easier transition to the next major Firefox release and removing Tor Launcher from the extension signing exceptions.

3) Cross-compiling our Linux 32-bit bundles on 64-bit machines[6]: we faced out-of-memory scenarios on some build machines when compiling 32-bit Linux bundles. They should be gone now with the cross-compilation. This is especially important for our switch to the next Firefox ESR which will very likely require even more resources to build Tor Browser.

4) Redesign of our security controls[7]: we like to make our security slider easier accessible and integrate it more into Tor Browser while we restructure our toolbar[8]. A patch for this feature is under review and will hopefully be available in the next alpha for further testing.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201902` keyword in our bug tracker.[9]

In March we'll continue polishing Tor Browser for Android, preparing a first stable release. This will be Tor Browser 8.5 which we hopefully get out at the end of the month. We have a number of tickets on our radar for that major release, which are still open, and that can get queried with the `tbb-8.5` keyword.[10] We'll see how far we get with those. Apart from release preparations we plan to finish our work on getting our testsuite[11] back into a usable shape and to work on our new mingw-w64/clang-based toolchain for Windows cross-compilation.[12]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201903` keyword in our bug tracker.[13]

Georg

[1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-curious-case-of-convexity... [2] https://bugs.torproject.org/28802 [3] https://bugs.torproject.org/28329 [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/27609 and child tickets [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/28044 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/26323 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/25658 [8] https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser-spec.git/tree/proposals/101-securi... [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~... [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/27105 and child tickets [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/28716 [13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...