Hi all!

In August we released our second alpha Tor Browser based on Firefox 60 ESR, 8.0a10[1], fixing a number of bugs and adding more features to make Tor Browser compatible with this new major Firefox version. It ships the first Tor release candidate, as well, 0.3.4.6-rc. Part of our onboarding[2] and our new about:tor page[3] landed in this alpha, too.

Besides this release we finished our feature and network code reviews (the trac tickets still need to get updated for that, though) and mainly worked on implementing the remaining bits of our onboarding experience and streamlining the Tor Browser 8 experience.

On mobile we finished the remaining items for our first alpha release but were still not able to get Tor Browser for Android 1.0a1 out this month. However, we made progress on integrating the mobile build process into our reproducible builds setup. First patches are up for review and are getting polished up for final inclusion in the repository.[4]

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in August is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201808` keyword in our bug tracker.[5] It's been 79 tickets this time!

For September we had planned to get our new releases out which we actually did in the first week: Tor Browser 8.0, 8.5a1, and 1.0a1 (for mobile) went live! We now plan to collect all the feedback we get and start working on the most important issues. For Tor Browser 8 we have the `tbb-8.0-issues` keyword, which gives an overview over reported problems and bugs which are on our radar.[6] We plan to address as much as we can of them in an upcoming 8.0.1 release.

Moreover, we plan to hammer down our next steps for our work on Tor Browser for Android. Orbot integration and Pluggable Transport support, as two of the most important improvements, are on our roadmap but there is more, like reproducible builds, that need to get coordinated.[7]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201809` keyword in our bug tracker.[8]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-80a10 [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26961 [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26960 [4] See: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26693 and child tickets [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as... [7] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-September/000906.html [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...