[tor-talk] TB for Win

[Kraktus]

On 08/04/2011, Mike Perry <mikeperry at fscked.org> wrote:
> Thus spake Greg Kalitnikoff (kalitnikoff at privatdemail.net):
>
>> Hi! When will TorBrowser with Firefox 4 for Windows be released? Tired
>> of waiting :)
>
> So are we. FF4 offers a ton of awesomeness that we want to leverage.
> For example, HTML5 allows youtube to work over Tor! (If you opt-in and
> set your useragent right):
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2832
>
> But it is a lot of work. Every new Firefox release requires a ton of
> addon API updates and auditing, and FF4 was a beast of a release in
> this respect. We've done the API updates (Torbutton 1.3.2-alpha) but
> we still need to do more auditing.
>
> We're also planning on changing our release structure for Firefox 4.
> We will very likely be maintaining our own (hopefully small) set of
> patches against Firefox 4 and shipping Tor Browser Bundle as our only
> supported platform, and discouraging the advanced tor packages and
> Torbutton+OS Firefox setups (and removing or unrecommending Torbutton
> on addons.mozilla.org). This also means that we need to sink a bunch
> of effort into making sure Tor Browser Bundle is a working solution
> for people on every platform.

I do not believe that will ever happen.
1. All the current Tor Browser Bundles that I can see are x86/amd64
only. There are people who use CPUs which are not intel-based, you
know.
2. Even if you expanded outside of x86/amd64, Firefox 4 itself does
not work on every operating system. So unless you are planning to work
with the Firefox people to port their browser to more platforms, or
offer different Tor Browser Bundles based on different browsers, there
are some limits here.
3. There are many Linux and BSD distributions, which run on many
different hardware platforms. Even restricting yourself to the ones
that actually support Firefox 4, that's way too many pre-compiled
binaries to keep track of, unless you really like monumental tasks.
4. As Firefox becomes more and more bloated, it will become less and
less feasible, and in some cases impossible, for people on low
resource machines to run it.
5. Some disabled people must use special accessible browsers.
6. Some people don't like GUIs and don't have X11 or any other GUI on
their computer, and are hence using things like lynx and links.
7. Not all the internet is http/https. Some people may not wish to use
Tor for web browsing, but may wish to use it for other things, like
IRC.

In short, I don't see the Tor Browser Bundle becoming a working
solution for people on every platform. Ever. However, Torbutton may
work on many non-Firefox browsers that still have the Gecko engine. In
short, please continue to release expert packages, Torbutton separate
from a browser, and documentation on how to best configure things
besides Firefox for use with Tor.

> So we're not sure exactly when all of this will be ready, but we're
> working as hard as we can to make it ASAP.
>
>
> --
> Mike Perry
> Mad Computer Scientist
> fscked.org evil labs