Hi all!

This is the first report of our work we did in 2018. This month we released a new major Tor Browser stable, 7.5[1] and the first alpha in the 8.0 alpha series, 8.0a1[2].

We made major improvements into our 7.5 series regarding our bootstrap process which should make it much easier for users to customize their settings in case they need bridges to circumvent censorship. Additionally, we finally enabled content sandboxing for our Windows builds and fixed some annoying bugs sandboxing related bugs on Linux that prevented the "Print to File" option from working. Tor Browser 7.5 is the first release with a stable Tor of the 0.3.2.x series (0.3.2.9) which makes it possible to reach v3 .onion services with Tor Browser from now on.

Apart from getting the new release out we worked in a number of non-release areas: we finally completed the deployment of our own Panopticlick-like fingerprinting measurement tool, FPCentral[3], and are currently investigating how to tie it closer to our regular quality assurance means. On the mobile side we further worked on integrating Orfox and the additional mobile patches into our tor-browser git repository[4] and started the Torbutton and TorLauncher port with proposals on how to do that.[5][6] Feedback and concerns are still very welcome!

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in January is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201801` keyword in our bug tracker.[7]

In February we hope to have Moat ready to be deployed in an alpha release and plan to pick up the latest Tor 0.3.3.x-alpha for further testing. Moreover, we have UX work going on to redo our circuit display[8] and a proposal to redesign our security controls is currently under discussion.[9] Please join we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas! Additionally, the work on Tor Browser 8.0 has begun which means our annual patch rebase to a new Firefox ESR version is under way[10] and efforts to upstream as many of those patches to Mozilla have begun and will continue during February.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201802` keyword in our bug tracker.[11]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-75-released [2] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a1-released [3] https://fpcentral.tbb.torproject.org/ [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/19675 [5] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-January/000723.html [6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-January/000735.html [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24309 [9] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-February/000756.html [10] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-January/000749.html [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...