The new TBB 3.0 series is almost ready for its first alpha release!
Here are the major highlights of the 3.0 series:
1. Usability, usability, usability! We've attempted to solve several major usability issues in this series, including:
A. No more Vidalia. The Tor process management is handled by the Tor Launcher extension. If you want the Vidalia features, you can point an existing Vidalia binary at control port 9151 after Tor Browser has launched, and it should still work.
B. The browser now uses a local about:tor homepage instead of check.torproject.org. A local verification against the control port is still performed, to ensure Tor is working, and a link to check.torproject.org is provided from the about:Tor homepage for manual verification as well.
C. For Windows users: an NSIS-based extractor now guides you through the TBB extraction and ensures the extracted bundle ends up on your Desktop, or in a known location chosen by you. Hopefully this will mean no more losing track of the extracted bundle files!
2. The bundles are all under the 25M gmail attachment size limit, so direct email and gettor attachments are once again possible.
3. We now use Gitian to build the bundles. The idea behind Gitian is to allow independent people to take our source code and produce exactly identical binaries on their own. We're not quite at the point where you always get a matching build, but the remaining differences are minor, and within a couple more releases we should have it fully reproducible. For now, we are posting all of the builds for comparison, and you can of course build and compare your own: https://gitweb.torproject.org/builders/tor-browser-bundle.git/blob/HEAD:/git...
Please try these out, test them, and give us feedback! The plan is to post them on the blog by Monday, unless something goes horribly wrong.
https://people.torproject.org/~mikeperry/tbb-3.0alpha1-builds/official/