Hello!

We are late this time, but here finally comes the report from the Tor Browser team for May. In May we made four releases, Tor Browser 8.0.9[1], 8.5a12[2], 8.5[3], and 9.0a1[4].

Tor Browser 8.0.9 and 8.5a12 were emergency releases dealing with Mozilla's add-on certificate disaster[5][6], which disabled NoScript in Tor Browser. We lost some days for our Tor Browser 8.5 preparation due to that issue but were pleased to get that new major version out later, on May 21. It contains a lot of new features and improvements, most notably the first stable bundle of Tor Browser for Android[7], improved security settings accessibility[8], and compatibility with Firefox's Photon user interface[9][10].

Tor Browser 9.0a1 picked up the fixes that went directly into 8.5 and were not available in the alpha series before. Moreover, it's the first alpha that updated parts of our compile environments[11] for our Firefox ESR transition.

Apart from release related work we made progress with enabling accessibility support for Windows users again[12], even though we did not manage to finish that work by the end of May. We are confident to have the final patches ready in June, though. Additionally, we started to work on our toolchain update for Firefox ESR 68[13] and rebasing our patches[14]. We were close as well to get Snowflake for Android integrated[15] into our build system and hope to finish that work in June, too.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in May is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201905` keyword in our bug tracker.[16]

Apart from finishing up our patches for the Windows accessibility bug and the Snowflake integration mentioned above we'll mostly continue working on our toolchain and patch rebasing for ESR 68. If all things go well we'll have some substantial progress for onion service authentication support in the browser by the next monthly report, too.[17]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201906` keyword in our bug tracker.[18]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-809 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85a12 [3] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85 [4] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-90a1 [5] https://blog.torproject.org/noscript-temporarily-disabled-tor-browser [6] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-ad... [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5709 [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25658 [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25702 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28622 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29307 [12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27503 [13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30321 [14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30429 [15] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28672 [16] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [17] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30237 [18] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...