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

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

This is the last report for our work done in 2018. In December we made
two releases, Tor Browser 8.0.4[1] and 8.5a6[2].

Besides updating component like Tor (to 0.3.4.9) and OpenSSL (to
1.0.2q), Tor Browser 8.0.4 contained many backports from patches tested
in our alpha series. The most important ones were a fingerprinting
defense against protocol handler enumeration[3], enabling Stylo for
macOS users[4], and setting the sandboxing level on Windows back to 5[5].

Tor Browser 8.5a6 got exiting updates on the Android side: It's been the
first release that is being built reproducibly[6] and has multi-locale
support in a single .apk.[7]

Besides working on releases we outlined our further mobile work towards
the next milestone, TBA-a3, which should bring us close to the shape we
want Tor Browser for Android to be in. All tickets tracked for this task
can be found under the `TBA-a3` keyword.[8] For the desktop side we made
further progress on our QA efforts[9] and our security settings
redesign[10].

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in November is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201812` keyword in our bug tracker.[11]

In January there are three big tasks we'll focus on. The first is
getting our mobile code into shape for the third milestone. Secondly, we
try to get as much done as possible for our security settings redesign.
Thirdly, efforts are under way to replace our mingw-w64/gcc toolchain
with a newer one based on mingw-w64/clang for Windows to be able to keep
pace with the changes in Firefox code.[12] Additionally, we plan to
start working on making Tor Launcher and Torbutton compatible with the
next Firefox ESR (which is supposed to be 68).[13][14]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201901` keyword in our bug tracker.[15]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-804
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-85a6
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1623
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26475
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26381
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25164
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26843
[8]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~TBA-a3
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27105
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25658
[11]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201812
[12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28716
[13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28044
[14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10760
[15]
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=~TorBrowserTeam201901&order=priority

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