[tor-project] May 2017 Report for the Tor Browser Team

[Georg Koppen]

Hi!

In May we made an alpha release, Tor Browser 7.0a4[1], mainly to test
the progress we made in our transition to Tor Browser based on Firefox
ESR 52.

Highlights in this release were stability improvements, binding
permissions to the first party domain in the URL bar, and neutering
various new and old fingerprinting vectors.

For users with a 64bit Linux system Selfrando support got added which
was one of our main security enhancements that lived in the hardened
series previously. We'll evaluate this defense in our alpha series over
the coming releases and hope we can ship it soon in our stable series as
well.

Apart from doing release work we focused on getting Tor Browser 7.0 more
stable, fixing our test suites[2], and on making our build system faster
and more scalable. Switching our official nightly builds to using rbm,
our new reproducible builds manager, got delayed, unfortunately, but we
continued to fix bugs in it as we found them[3] and hope to get to the
transition during June eventually.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in May is
accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201705 tag in our bug tracker.[4]

For June we plan to release Tor Browser 7.0 and move onto the Firefox
ESR 52 train, finally. We expect some fallout from that and will address
the major issues as fast as we can while we are finishing the remaining
items for the 7.0 transition[5]. We plan to continue our build system
improvements and get back to integrating our Panopticlick instance into
our Q&A environment as a top priority[6]. Furthermore, we'll start
upstreaming our newly written patches to Mozilla and plan to create new
ones for outstanding tracking and fingerprinting defenses.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
TorBrowserTeam201706 tag in our bug tracker.[7]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a4-released
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21982
[3] E.g. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22444
[4]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201705
[5]
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=~tbb-7.0-must
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119
[7]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201706

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