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

[Pier Angelo Vendrame]

Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for September 2024.
I dedicated a consistent part of this month to various tasks to fix 
regressions we got after migrating to Firefox 128 or for refinements.

I started by re-implementing our search engine customization.
Upstream themselves reworked their configuration, so I ended up 
reverting our previous patch and implementing a new one [0].
While at it, I removed some search engines we used to bundle by default, 
such as Yahoo and Twitter.
I also re-implemented the functionality to send DuckDuckGo searches 
through its HTML-only version when running at the safest security level [1].
After doing this for Tor Browser, I wrote similar patches for Mullvad 
Browser [2].

After that, I worked on the Android part of our build system. I removed 
the Lox WASM blob [3], which isn't currently used on Android. This 
allowed us to ship x86 APKs on the Play Store again.
Then, I simulated a release build to check they don't fail when we're 
close to the release period. However, they didn't work, and I had to fix 
our dependency list [4].
Also, I fixed single-arch Android test builds [5].

Then, I focused on a disk leak problem. Firefox downloads and opens some 
formats in the browser without asking for confirmation by default when 
the server sends them as attachments.
There's a preference for force-inlining PDFs 
(browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline), but it doesn't work on 
other formats. Therefore, I extended that functionality, but I'm not 
completely satisfied. In our issue [6], I documented all the various 
problems we still have. However, I will need more time and some help 
from upstream to provide a better fix.
I also went back to one of my passions: fonts. I investigated the 
differences between having and not having our custom font configuration 
on Linux [7], and I thought of some strategies for 14.5, as we are too 
late for 14.0. For now, I created some font aliases to improve 
compatibility and updated our bundled fonts.

In addition to that, I helped with releasing. I rebased our browsers 
onto Firefox 115.16.0esr and 128.3.0esr. Also, I prepared 13.5.3 and 
13.5a10. The latter was an unplanned alpha release from a legacy branch 
to test the watershed update procedure, which we need to provide 
alternative updates for legacy platforms (Windows 7/8 and macOS up to 
10.14).

Finally, I attended the Reproducible Build Summit in Hamburg [8]. I 
joined the group that focused on writing documentation for repro build 
beginners.

Best,
Pier

[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1162
[1] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42617
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/mullvad-browser/-/issues/328
[3] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1174
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41234
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/41232
[6] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42220
[7] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41799
[8] https://reproducible-builds.org/events/hamburg2024/