[tor-reports] Pearl Crescent Report – April 2015

[Mark Smith]

Tor-related work that the Pearl Crescent team did in April
(Kathy Brade and Mark Smith):

* Firefox Updater for Tor Browser:

Other than testing to ensure that the updater would work well Tor 
Browser 4.5, we did not spend a lot of time on updater issues during 
most of April.  Near the very end of the month, we spent time reviewing 
the changes that Mozilla engineers made to the updater, the update 
service, and related code between Firefox 31 and 38 (this will help us 
as we port our patches over to the ESR38 codebase).

Miscellaneous updater tickets that we spent some time on:
   "Windows: silent failure if no permission to apply update"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15491

   "Tor Browser 4.5 displays signature validation error during update"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15532

   "Update loop due to mismatched Tor Browser version"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15637

   "Strange errors with full Linux update when disk records are enabled"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15857


* Tor Browser and Torbutton:

We spent a little time testing the Tor Browser 4.0.8 and 4.5 candidate 
builds.

We helped with bug triage, performed many code reviews, and worked on 
various fixes in an effort to ship Tor Browser 4.5.

Tickets that we fixed:
   "HTTP Basic Authentication prompt only displayed once"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14716

   "crash on some SVG pages when svg.in-content.enabled=false"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15794

   "some security slider prefs do not trigger custom checkbox"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15795

Tickets for which we did code reviews:
   #13875, #15502, #15533, #15689, #15741, #15747, #15757.

Other tickets that we spent significant time on:
   "No certificate hierarchy"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13926

   "Tor Browser cannot be launched by different users on OS X."
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15586

   "Unable to disable proxy in Tor Browser"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15800


* Tor Launcher:

Again this month, we found some time for Tor Launcher usability 
improvements.

Fixed for Tor Browser 4.5:
   "'Open Settings' button doesn't stop Tor from bootstrapping"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11879

   "Tor Launcher strips "bridge" from the middle of bridge lines"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13576

   "display host:port if HOSTADDR is provided by Tor"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15657

   "network is not disabled when wizard is shown if default
        bridges are configured"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15704

Other Tor Launcher tickets that we made progress on:
   "Make it easier to visually distinguish 'proxy' and
       'bridge' configuration screens"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15145


* Miscellaneous Activities:
    We participated in the weekly Tor Browser dev meetings on IRC and
    in various design discussions on IRC and on the mailing lists.


* Planned for May 2015:
     - Assist with Tor Browser 4.5 issues / respond to user feedback.

     - Assist with porting Tor Browser patches to the Firefox ESR 38
       codebase.  Our initial focus will be the updater patches.

     - Fix any updater issues that occur in the field, and continue
       to improve the updater user experience.

     - Continue to look at Tor Browser, Tor Launcher, and Torbutton
       usability issues.

-- 
Mark Smith
Pearl Crescent
http://pearlcrescent.com/