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

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

June was a busy month for the Tor Browser team. We released 4 new Tor
Browser versions: 7.5.5[1] and 8.0a8[2] picked up a security fix in
Firefox (52.8.1esr). Tor Browser 7.5.6[3] shipped a new Tor (0.3.3.7)
and a number of backports from the alpha series. It is planned to be the
last stable release based on Firefox 52 ESR.

Which brings me to our fourth release, Tor Browser 8.0a9[4]. It is the
first one based on Firefox 60 ESR. We rebased all our patches, made our
extensions compatible, and adapted our toolchains as needed. We have
working bundles available for Win32/64, macOS, and Linux 32/64. Major
improvements are the newly designed circuit display[5], and .onion
security indicators[6]. A first glimpse of our new logos, which are
compatible to Firefox' Photon UI, is visible in the updated Torbutton
icon.[7] Please give this alpha a try, if you can, and report bugs. We
track all Firefox 60 ESR related tickets with the `ff60-esr` keyword.[8]

Apart from release related tasks we made progress on the network code
and new feature audit to make sure we don't miss criticial changes for
Tor Browser and patch them if necessary. The first round of bugs for the
 latter got filed and we started to work on them.

On mobile we streamlined our work towards the first alpha release of Tor
Browser for Android which is planned for later this July. Among the work
we did was rebasing the mobile patches for Firefox 60 ESR[9] and
investigating and fixing potential proxy bypass issues[10]. All tickets
related to the mobile alpha release are easy to follow as they are child
bugs of bug 26531.[11]

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in June is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201806` keyword in our bug tracker.[12]

For July we plan to close as many ESR 60 related issues for the desktop
browser and aim at releasing another alpha at the end of the month. For
mobile, resolving the loose ends and getting our UX related pieces ready
for the release will consume most of our time. In parallel we are
finally working on getting the mobile browser build integrated into our
reproducible builds system,[13] which is another, important step towards
parity with the desktop bundles we currently ship.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201807` keyword in our bug tracker.[14]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-755-released
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a8-released
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-756-released-
[4] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-80a9
[5] https://bugs.torproject.org/24309
[6] https://bugs.torproject.org/23247
[7] https://bugs.torproject.org/26430
[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=~ff60-esr&order=priority
[9] https://bugs.torproject.org/26401
[10] https://bugs.torproject.org/21863
[11] https://bugs.torproject.org/26531
[12]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201806
[13] https://bugs.torproject.org/25164
[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=~TorBrowserTeam201807&order=priority

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