[tbb-dev] Nightly builds based on Firefox 78 ESR and beyond

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

Some of you might have seen that our Tor Browser nightly builds for
desktop switched to Firefox 78 ESR recently. We've been waiting with a
more or less official announcement until we got our nightly setup into a
more stable shape, but believe now is a good time to call for wider testing.

If you already were on the nightly channel before reading this mail you
have likely already got an update to Tor Browser using ESR 78[1], but
alas only one, due to a bug we overlooked[2]. So, the easiest way to
solve that particular problem is to save your bookmarks and start over
again with a fresh nightly build.[3] Any nightly build after August 2,
2020 should be good.

For those of you not already being on the nightly channel and willing to
test the latest Tor Browser work, just grab the latest nightly[3] and
enjoy the auto-updater to keep you up-to-date[1], which makes this
bleeding-edge series so more useful.

Please report bugs as you find them, ideally in our bug tracker[4], but
we are happy to receive them via other channels, too.

We currently plan to release a first Tor Browser 10 alpha based on
Firefox 78 ESR in about two weeks from now, making sure the
toolchains[5] are in the shape we want them to be for the stable release
and the audit for potential proxy bypass bugs is done[6] (and issues
encountered are addressed). Those two items are the hard blockers for
that first alpha but it goes without saying that we try to squeeze as
many bug fixes as we can into that alpha as well. :)

As I indicated at the beginning of this mail the above plan and status
update is only for our desktop Tor Browser. For mobile we are still busy
to get the switch to Fenix going and announcements for (wider) testing
of Tor Browser on that platform will be sent out separately.

Thanks,
Georg

[1] With the caveat that we currently only provide auto-updates for
en-US, de, es-ES, fr, and ru locales.
[2]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40033
[3] http://f4amtbsowhix7rrf.onion/tor-browser-builds/
[4] https://gitlab.torproject.org/users/sign_in
[5] See:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/34227
and child bugs for issues we are aware of right now
[6]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40017

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