[tbb-dev] #25112 - Tor Browser 7.5 is not working on Windows Vista 64bit

[Georg Koppen]

Richard Pospesel:
> So I've tracked down the root of the problem here: we're not currently
> building nor packaging wow_helper.exe with Tor Browser.  This exe is a
> necessary part of the sandbox init process for Vista (but not newer
> Windows OSes)

But that's only affecting 64bit Vista, right? FWIW: The upstream bug is
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1110760.

> I'm able to build locally with mingw via:
> 
> 	x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ -m64 -municode -static -static-libgcc
> -static-libstdc++ -I../../.. *.cc -o wow_helper.exe
> 
> Dropping that exe into the Browser folder lets sandbox'd tabs work once
> more!
> 
> That said, getting this building with FF's build system and also
> updating RBM to work with the new dependencies requires some specialized
> knowledge I don't currently have, so any pointers on this front would be
> great.

We don't have a 64bit toolchain ready for the stable series, which makes
it a bit harder.

> Just spit-balling, but the main hurdles as I see them are as follows:
> 
> - firefox : wow_helper is built with special Makefile.in configuration
> file which temporarily overwrites the CXX, LIB and friends to point to
> the 64-bit MSVC compiler toolchain.  We can probably do a similar thing
> here with x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++
> 
> - rbm : need to update the docker image to install the x86_64 version of
> the mingw toolchain.
> 
> - tor-browser : will need to update the nsis installer and possibly
> other things to properly include and deploy the wow_helper.exe

I am not convinced we'd need the latter. I think we could just copy the
.exe into the Browser dir during the bundle step?

> However, Chromium removed this entire code path back in 2016 when they
> dropped support for XP and Vista, and somewhere between version 52.6 and
> latest this code path was also removed in Firefox.  So, depending on the
> timeline for updating Tor Browser to latest, we may just want to ignore
> this issue just do a simpler code patch that disables sandboxing all
> together for those under Windows 7.

I am fine with disabling sandboxing as an option. Could we just apply
that to the problematic Windows version (i.e. Vista 64bit if I
understand this correctly)? Thera are WINVER and _WIN32_WINNT_VISTA
defines used in the codebase which might be things to look into.

Georg

> best,
> -Richard
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