Hi everyone! Here is my status report for August 2022.

This month I worked mainly on the Tor Browser switch from 91.x ESR to 102.x ESR. At the beginning of the month, I continued reviewing the rebase I started at the end of July [0].

Then, I focused on updating our toolchains, which took me two weeks. I first found some issues with rustc (the most problematic one was that it got stuck while compiling Firefox on Debian Jessie [1]; I resolved it by enabling jemalloc). I took the occasion to make rustc reuse the LLVM tools we have already been building instead of building them again to shorten the process [2]. Another massive change is that we use only Clang to build Windows binaries (almost: rustc needs to link libgcc, and NSIS has an assembly module that only GCC and MASM can compile) [3].

The next step was some maintenance on the existing code. I linted all our patches, thanks to which we found some minor fixes [4]. It was propedeutic to move tor-launcher and torbutton to the main Tor Browser patchset [5]. I have also started working on it but then stopped to fix the issues Richard found when auditing Firefox closed tickets. In particular, this week, I have been analyzing new problems related to fingerprinting through fonts [6].

We are finally close to building the first Tor Browser alpha based on 102.2 ESR (12.0a2) for desktop and Android, too! Please, consider testing it and sending us feedback!

Thanks, Pier

[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40730 [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40... [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/29... and linked issues [4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40012 [5] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/... [6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41116