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

[Georg Koppen]

Hi all!

In April we made two releases, Tor Browser 6.5.2[1], and Tor Browser
7.0a3[2].

Tor Browser 6.5.2 picked up Firefox security bug fixes and provided
fixes for a broken Twitter experience and a crash bug affecting users on
Windows. Additionally, we updated the bridges we ship in Tor Browser.

The alpha release was the first one based on Firefox ESR 52. There were
a lot of changes related to switching to this new major Firefox
version.[3] We got great bug reports from our alpha testers and either
already resolved those issues or are still working on doing so for the
next alpha release which is planned for mid-May.

There was no new release in the hardened series and there won't be one
in the future either. Rather, users on this series got updated to the
latest alpha version. We discontinued the hardened series as we heard
numerous reports from users being confused about it being called
"hardened" while including debugging tools as well.[4] We recommend
using the Sandboxed Tor Browser from now on instead.[5]

Apart from doing release work we focused on getting Tor Browser 7.0 more
stable and on making our build system faster and more scalable.[6] We
are about to switch our official nightly builds to using rbm, our new
reproducible builds manager.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in April is
accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201704 tag in our bug tracker[7].

For May we plan to do another Tor Browser alpha release picking up the
latest changes and testing them. If all goes well we should be ready to
release Tor Browser 7.0 by end of May/begin of June. The tickets we want
to have solved by then are currently tagged with the
`tbb-7.0-must-alpha` and `tbb-7.0-must` keywords.[8]

Besides working on getting Tor Browser 7 into stable shape we plan to
continue our build system improvements and spend further time on
integrating our Panopticlick instance into our Q&A environment[9].

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
TorBrowserTeam201705 tag in our bug tracker.[10]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-652-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-70a3-released
[3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-qa/2017-April/000892.html
[4]
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/discontinuing-hardened-tor-browser-series
[5] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en#downloads-sandbox
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17379
[7]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201704
[8]
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
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119
[10]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201705

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