[tor-project] Tor Browser Team: December and January report

[Pili Guerra]

Hi everyone,

A very belated happy new year to everyone from the Tor Browser team along with our December 2019 and January 2020 report. 

We kicked off December with the 9.0.2[1] and 9.5a3[2] releases. These releases are still suffering from build reproducibility issues[3] and we continued our work on fixing these during the month. We also continued working on our automatic nightly builds[4] infrastructure, scripts and keys to enable us to easily provide these in future. Other than that this was a relatively quiet month with much of the team taking a well deserved break and charging their batteries ready for the new year. 

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in December is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam201912[5] keyword in our bug tracker.

During January we've been mostly working on our Sponsor 27[6] deliverables to improve the user experience when accessing v3 Onion Services using Tor Browser. This work includes adding capabilities to access onion services which require a client to provide an authorization key[7] as well as informing users about errors[8][9] when accessing an onion service, updating the url bar with indicators that explain and educate users about the characteristics of the onion service[10] they are visiting and making it easier for users to remember v3 onion service names[11]. We have also started exploring the behaviour to redirect to the onion service version of a website when this is advertised using the Alt-Svc[12] and Onion-Location[13] headers.

We have also continued working on providing more granular security setings[14], scoped at the website level and have decided on an approach to implement this in Tor Browser. 

Our work to provide automatic nightly updates is still ongoing and we hope to have some developments in this area very soon. We had three releases in January: 9.0.3[15], 9.0.4[16] and 9.5a4[17]

In January we also completed the Tor Browser Team lead role transition with Matt now fully onboarded into this role. We thank Georg for his leadership during the past few years and wish him the best of luck with his new role!

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in January is accessible using the TorBrowserTeam202001[18] keyword in our bug tracker.

All tickets on our radar for February can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam202002` keyword in our bug tracker.[19]

Thanks for reading!

Pili

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-902 <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-902>
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a3 <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a3>
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32053 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32053>
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18867 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18867>
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201912 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201912>
[6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor27 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor27>
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30000 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30000>
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30022 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30022>
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30025 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30025>
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32645 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32645>
[11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30029 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30029>
[12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30024 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30024>
[13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952>
[14] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30570 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30570>
[15] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-903 <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-903>
[16] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-904 <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-904>
[17] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a4 <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a4>
[18] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam202001 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam202001>
[19] 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=~TorBrowserTeam202002&order=priority <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=~TorBrowserTeam202002&order=priority>
—
Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams
pili at torproject dot org 
gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45

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