[tor-project] February 2019 report for the Tor Browser team

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

In February the Tor Browser team made two releases, 8.0.6 and 8.5a8,
mainly to pick up a security bugfix for Firefox[1].

Apart from that we worked on four major projects during the month:

1) Getting Tor Browser for Android ready for the next big alpha
milestone: we got pluggable transport support working[2] and are
currently finalizing our new UI[3]. With a bit of luck we can even test
the enhanced Tor Onion Proxy Library (TOPL) in our next alpha as well,
which will finally allow us to drop Orbot as a dependency.[4]

2) Integrating Tor Launcher into tor-browser[5]: this is basically done
and awaiting review and further testing in upcoming alphas. The tighter
integration into the browser code itself will allow us an easier
transition to the next major Firefox release and removing Tor Launcher
from the extension signing exceptions.

3) Cross-compiling our Linux 32-bit bundles on 64-bit machines[6]: we
faced out-of-memory scenarios on some build machines when compiling
32-bit  Linux bundles. They should be gone now with the
cross-compilation. This is especially important for our switch to the
next Firefox ESR which will very likely require even more resources to
build Tor Browser.

4) Redesign of our security controls[7]: we like to make our security
slider easier accessible and integrate it more into Tor Browser while we
restructure our toolbar[8]. A patch for this feature is under review and
will hopefully be available in the next alpha for further testing.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February is
accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201902` keyword in our bug tracker.[9]

In March we'll continue polishing Tor Browser for Android, preparing a
first stable release. This will be Tor Browser 8.5 which we hopefully
get out at the end of the month. We have a number of tickets on our
radar for that major release, which are still open, and that can get
queried with the `tbb-8.5` keyword.[10] We'll see how far we get with
those. Apart from release preparations we plan to finish our work on
getting our testsuite[11] back into a usable shape and to work on our
new mingw-w64/clang-based toolchain for Windows cross-compilation.[12]

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the
`TorBrowserTeam201903` keyword in our bug tracker.[13]

Georg

[1]
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-curious-case-of-convexity-confusion.html
[2] https://bugs.torproject.org/28802
[3] https://bugs.torproject.org/28329
[4] https://bugs.torproject.org/27609 and child tickets
[5] https://bugs.torproject.org/28044
[6] https://bugs.torproject.org/26323
[7] https://bugs.torproject.org/25658
[8]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser-spec.git/tree/proposals/101-security-controls-redesign.txt
[9]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201902
[10]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~tbb-8.5
[11] https://bugs.torproject.org/27105 and child tickets
[12] https://bugs.torproject.org/28716
[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=~TorBrowserTeam201903&order=priority

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