[tor-project] March 2018 report for the Tor Browser team

[Georg Koppen]

Hi!

In March we were quite busy keeping up with Mozilla's almost weekly
security updates. Two releases, Tor Browser 7.5.1[1] and 8.0a3[2], got
out during the Tor dev meeting (which was a new experience) and
contained an update to Firefox 52.7.0esr + newer Tor versions (0.3.2.10
and 0.3.3.3-alpha, respectively). Additionally, they mostly shipped bug
fixes (e.g. a fix for broken Windows Vista 64bit builds) with one
notable exception: Moat, our new feature to request bridges via meek
from BridgeDB, made it into 8.0a3 for wider testing.

Tor Browser 7.5.2[3] and 8.0a4[4] shipped Firefox 52.7.2esr including
the fixes for the bugs found during Pwn2Own. Tor Browser 7.5.3[5] and
8.0a5[6] in turn picked up Firefox 52.7.3esr.

Apart from releases we made progress in our preparations to switch to
Firefox ESR 60: we worked on rebasing our patches, integrating rust into
our build setup, and updating our toolchains, to name just a few areas.

On the mobile side we finally merged the Orfox patches into our
tor-browser repo[7] and started to help with getting updated Orfox
versions faster out to our users. The latter resulted in new Orfox
versions based on Firefox 52.7.2esr and Firefox 52.7.3esr following the
above mentioned Tor Browser releases.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in March is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201803` keyword in our bug tracker.[8]

For April we are excited to see a lot of progress in our work with the
UX team: we are close to have an updated circuit display ready[9] and
plan to make improvements to our security controls[10] and our about:tor
start page[11].

Two additional major areas of work for April will be Tor Browser for
Android and preparations for Firefox 60. For the former, we outlined a
mini-roadmap containing all the items we need to have solved before we
want to ship a first alpha (which is planned for July)[12] and are now
following up on those tasks. The latter is more of patch rebasing and
toolchain updates already seen in March. We hope to start early this
time with reviewing the new features that landed between Firefox 52 and
60 to have more time for writing patches. But we'll see.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201804` keyword in our bug tracker.[13]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-751-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a3-released
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-752-released
[4] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a4-released
[5] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-753-released
[6] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a5-released
[7] https://bugs.torproject.org/19675
[8]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201803
[9] https://bugs.torproject.org/24309
[10] https://bugs.torproject.org/25658
[11] https://bugs.torproject.org/25695
[12]
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-March/000814.html ff.
[13]
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=~TorBrowserTeam201804&order=priority

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