[tbb-dev] status report

[Arthur D. Edelstein]

Hi Everyone,

Here's what I worked on over the past week:

I tracked down and wrote a patch for
https://trac.torproject.org/18859
Not strictly a TBB bug, but should improve performance for users, I hope.

Also on the subject of performance, I did a small manual test to try
to understand the benefits (if any) of enabling HTTP2:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14952#comment:24
Indeed it seems the multiplexing feature of HTTP2 can offer us some
useful speedups. So at Mozilla I hope to talk to the Mozilla folks
about what, if anything, might still be a tracking vector in HTTP2
that we need to fix before we can safely enable it in Tor Browser.

I worked on MPX (https://trac.torproject.org/16352) and made some
progress, but it turns out there are more issues with building some of
the Firefox components that I need to solve before I have a final
patch.

I also spent quite some time on https://trac.torproject.org/23930. I
wasn't able to reproduce the problem -- it seems there may be
something special in font set that was originally reported by the
user. In any case, I have a guess at what is happening, and a possible
fix. I'm going to build a Tor Browser for the user to test.

I wrote again to a number of exit operators with bad DNS to ask them
to upgrade their tor version. The overall average DNS timeout rate is
now down to 4.5%. I'm hoping it will continue to fall and in the near
future we can apply a badexit flag to remaining exits showing high DNS
timeouts.

So this week I will be meeting with Mozilla and Tor folks for planning
the future uplift work, discussing  the proxy, browser sandboxing,
mobile work, etc.. When I get back I will continue to work on various
bits of unfinished business including crashes (#23930 and #24145),
#18101, #22343. And I might look into one or two performance-related
things.

Arthur