[tor-project] PieroV's Monthly Status Report, May 2024

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for May 2024.

This month, Firefox 128, which will be the base of our 14.0, reached 
nightly.
Therefore, we're releasing 13.5 soon (with the 115.12 ESR update unless 
we find some last-minute problems) and then moving all our efforts to 
the ESR transition.
So, in the past month, I partially worked on finishing some details for 
the 13.5. The rest of the time, I continued uplifting our patches and 
rebasing our patchset on Firefox's rapid release to ease the transition.

For the 13.5, I finished the work on the Mullvad Browser Windows 
installer I started at the end of April [0]. We wanted to make the 
installation UX as short as possible. Only one click: you confirm you 
want to install the browser, and that's it 😄️. But if you want, you can 
still customize the installation options.
When doing so, I discovered the welcome and the finish page of NSIS 
installers are written with the Modern UI 2 tools you would also use for 
custom pages. This made the task easier and less hacky, and the final 
result is identical to what users are familiar with.
I also started implementing a localization pipeline that will be used by 
Tor Browser's installer as well.

Then, I worked on Android localization. When we evaluated whether we 
needed to enable multi-lingual GeckoView builds [1], we didn't realize 
they were also required by the formatting APIs [2]. So, in practice, TBA 
supported only formatting in en-US. Enabling multi-lingual builds solved 
this issue.
We also noticed that region data was still leaked. Therefore, I wrote a 
patch to make the Accepted-Language HTTP header match exactly the tag of 
the active translation (when not using spoof English) [3].

As for the uplifting work, I finally managed to land a patch [4] I wrote 
when we were moving from 91 to 102 🎉️. In addition, with the help of 
Firefox devtools developers, I implemented some tests and uplifted the 
patch not to persist the data about custom requests done in PBM [5]. 
This patch was initially developed by cypherpunks1, as well as the patch 
to add the missing origin attributes to the reader mode [6] that I also 
uplifted.
The patch for the placeholders of the datetime-local input [7] hasn't 
landed yet, but at least I found why the tests were failing, and I 
provided a new revision. I'm waiting for another review from upstream.

For the ESR rebases, I started a branch based on 127 and the branches 
based on 128, even though it's still nightly.
I also started writing some reviewing guides (which gave me an 
opportunity for additional self-reviews).
I found a very nice tool called "aha" [8] that converts ANSI escape 
sequences to HTML. I'm using it to create HTML versions of range-diff, 
on top of which I'm writing reports on why I needed to adapt our patches.

Finally, I did some of the usual maintenance and help for this month's 
releases.

Cheers,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-browser/-/issues/200
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41143
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42552
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42562
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1787790
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1892052
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1892046
[7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880108
[8] https://github.com/theZiz/aha