[tor-reports] Pearl Crescent Report – August 2015

[Mark Smith]

Tor-related work completed by the Pearl Crescent team in August 2015
(Kathy Brade and Mark Smith):

* Tor Browser Updater:

We (finally) fixed the following ticket:
   "After update, load a static tab with change notes"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13512
Thank you to Georg and Nicolas for their help. This improvement should 
appear when people use the built-in updater to upgrade to Tor Browser 5.5a3.

We also did some testing of the updater in the recent Tor Browser 
releases (5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.5a1, 5.5a2).

And we reviewed some recent Mozilla updater security fixes to ensure 
that our updater patches will integrate cleanly and correctly with 
Mozilla's changes.


* Tor Browser and Torbutton:

This month, we spent much of our time fixing regressions and annoyances 
in Tor Browser 5.x. We created fixes for a bunch of tickets, most of 
which have already been merged for future 5.0.x and/or 5.5.x Tor Browser 
releases.  Interesting tickets that we worked on:

   "about:preferences is broken with security slider set to High"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16775

   "Media tab missing from Page Info"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16842

   "'Set Up Sync...' still appears in TBB 5.0 Tools menu and Prefs"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16778

   "use ThreadsafeIsCallerChrome() instead of IsCallerChrome()"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16715

We also reviewed other people's patches, including for tickets #12240, 
#16722, #16727, #16771, #16860, and for Mozilla bug #232227.


* Tor Launcher:

We started to look at some dialog layout issues that appeared starting 
in Tor Browser 5.5a1 (when the font fingerprinting improvements were 
introduced):
   "Tor Network Settings dialog not wide enough"
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16753


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

    We completed some Tor Project, Inc. surveys.


* Planned for September:
   - Assist with the Tor Browser 5.0.x maintenance releases, with a
     focus on fixing regressions and important usability problems.

   - Help with improvements for the Tor Browser 5.5 alpha series.
     This will include addressing the Tor Launcher dialog layout
     issues and some about:tor layout problems (#16735) that occur
     due to the improved font fingerprinting defense.

   - Research Mozilla Sync password handling for ticket #16778.

   - As a followup to the updater changes we made for #13512 (load a
     changelog in a tab after an update), we will look at #16940 to
     see if we can improve reliability by loading the change log
     from a local file.

   - Scope out the work to make Tor Browser Unix Domain Socket aware.
     See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14270

   - Work on other Tor Browser, Tor Launcher, and Torbutton usability
     issues as time permits.

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