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

[Georg Koppen]

Hi all!

Just a short update on what the Tor Browser team worked with in February
and what we are up to in March.

We made an alpha release, Tor Browser 8.0a2[1], containing a new Tor
alpha (0.3.3.2-alpha) and a bunch of updates to other components
(Torbutton, Tor Launcher, HTTPS Everywhere, and NoScript).

Apart from that we worked on fixing up Moat which allows receiving
bridges from BridgeDB using the meek pluggable transport.[2] It will be
available in the next alpha which is scheduled for next week for further
testing. Moreover, almost all of our remaining time got spent on
upstreaming as many patches as possible to Mozilla as the merge window
for the next Firefox ESR (60) is closing next week. We spent time on
updating our toolchains as well.[3][4][5] On the mobile side we are
close to have the Orfox patches merged into our tor-browser.git
repository[6] and both Tor Launcher and Torbutton integrated into it as
well.[7][8] That's a first step in providing their functionality to
Android users, too.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201802` keyword in our bug tracker.[9]

In March we hope to make further progress on patch uplifting and
toolchain updates, and we will be at the dev meeting to plan for the
next six months including the Tor Browser 8 release. We hope to get back
to our user interface improvements which are still in the pipeline (e.g.
circuit display updates[10]) while starting the countdown for Tor
Browser 8 preparations: that includes finishing the rebase of our
remaining patches to ESR 60 and writing new patches to address
compatibility requirements and new "features" coming with the new
Firefox version.

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201803` keyword in our bug tracker.[11]

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a2-released
[2] https://bugs.torproject.org/23136
[3] https://bugs.torproject.org/16472
[4] https://bugs.torproject.org/25304
[5] https://bugs.torproject.org/21777
[6] https://bugs.torproject.org/19675
[7] https://bugs.torproject.org/25013
[8] https://bugs.torproject.org/25260
[9]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201802
[10] https://bugs.torproject.org/24309
[11]
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=~TorBrowserTeam201803&order=priority

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