[tor-project] May 2019 report for the Tor Browser team

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

We are late this time, but here finally comes the report from the Tor
Browser team for May. In May we made four releases, Tor Browser
8.0.9[1], 8.5a12[2], 8.5[3], and 9.0a1[4].

Tor Browser 8.0.9 and 8.5a12 were emergency releases dealing with
Mozilla's add-on certificate disaster[5][6], which disabled NoScript in
Tor Browser. We lost some days for our Tor Browser 8.5 preparation due
to that issue but were pleased to get that new major version out later,
on May 21. It contains a lot of new features and improvements, most
notably the first stable bundle of Tor Browser for Android[7], improved
security settings accessibility[8], and compatibility with Firefox's
Photon user interface[9][10].

Tor Browser 9.0a1 picked up the fixes that went directly into 8.5 and
were not available in the alpha series before. Moreover, it's the first
alpha that updated parts of our compile environments[11] for our Firefox
ESR transition.

Apart from release related work we made progress with enabling
accessibility support for Windows users again[12], even though we did
not manage to finish that work by the end of May. We are confident to
have the final patches ready in June, though. Additionally, we started
to work on our toolchain update for Firefox ESR 68[13] and rebasing our
patches[14]. We were close as well to get Snowflake for Android
integrated[15] into our build system and hope to finish that work in
June, too.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in May is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201905` keyword in our bug tracker.[16]

Apart from finishing up our patches for the Windows accessibility bug
and the Snowflake integration mentioned above we'll mostly continue
working on our toolchain and patch rebasing for ESR 68. If all things go
well we'll have some substantial progress for onion service
authentication support in the browser by the next monthly report, too.[17]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201906` keyword in our bug tracker.[18]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-809
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85a12
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85
[4] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-90a1
[5] https://blog.torproject.org/noscript-temporarily-disabled-tor-browser
[6]
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5709
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25658
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25702
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28622
[11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29307
[12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27503
[13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30321
[14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30429
[15] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28672
[16]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201905
[17] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30237
[18]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=assigned&status=merge_ready&status=needs_information&status=needs_review&status=needs_revision&status=new&status=reopened&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201906&order=priority

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