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

[Georg Koppen]

Hi all!

In August the Tor Browser team made two releases, Tor Browser 7.0.4[1]
and Tor Browser 7.5a4[2].

Both releases updated Firefox to 52.3.0esr and bumped the respective Tor
versions included. Moreover, we added a fix to avoid scary warnings when
dealing with .onion services that don't have a TLS certificate[3].

In addition to that, the alpha release provided a number of improvements
and bug fixes that needed more testing: selfrando enabled Tor Browser
bundles for 32-bit Linux users[4], regression fixes around our external
helper app dialog[5], and better W^X enforcement for Tor Browser on
Windows[6] to mention just the highlights.

Non-release work focused on remaining Sponsor4 items: we tested the
Gitian replacement we have been working on for the past months and are
switching over to it while I am writing this status report. The next
alpha release is supposed to get built with rbm/tor-browser-build to
give it a wider testing and iron out remaining issues. We documented and
fixed the first issues when building Tor Browser for 64-bit Windows.[8]
And, finally, our UX redesign of Tor Launcher got a first prototype we
can experiment with and improve upon.[9]

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in August is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201708` keyword in our bug tracker.[10]

In September we plan to get our first alpha builds out which are based
on rbm/tor-browser-build. Moreover, we finally plan to integrate
FPCentral as our Panopticlick instance into our QA system.[11]
Additional items on our ToDo list are: enabling sandboxing in Linux
bundles in the next alpha release[12], making progress with our Tor
Browser for 64-bit Windows project, getting the proposed Tor Launcher
improvements better tested and finetuned, and starting to update the
security slider by taking past year's Firefox vulnerabilities into
account[13].

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201709` keyword in our bug tracker.[14]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-704-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-75a4-released
[3] https://bugs.torproject.org/21321
[4] https://bugs.torproject.org/20848
[5] https://bugs.torproject.org/22618
[6] https://bugs.torproject.org/22563
[7] https://bugs.torproject.org/23213
[8] https://bugs.torproject.org/23229
[9] https://bugs.torproject.org/23261
[10]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201708
[11] https://bugs.torproject.org/6119
[12] https://bugs.torproject.org/22692
[13] https://bugs.torproject.org/23409
[14]
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=~TorBrowserTeam201709&order=priority

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