Hi all!
Just a short update on what the Tor Browser team worked with in February and what we are up to in March.
We made an alpha release, Tor Browser 8.0a2[1], containing a new Tor alpha (0.3.3.2-alpha) and a bunch of updates to other components (Torbutton, Tor Launcher, HTTPS Everywhere, and NoScript).
Apart from that we worked on fixing up Moat which allows receiving bridges from BridgeDB using the meek pluggable transport.[2] It will be available in the next alpha which is scheduled for next week for further testing. Moreover, almost all of our remaining time got spent on upstreaming as many patches as possible to Mozilla as the merge window for the next Firefox ESR (60) is closing next week. We spent time on updating our toolchains as well.[3][4][5] On the mobile side we are close to have the Orfox patches merged into our tor-browser.git repository[6] and both Tor Launcher and Torbutton integrated into it as well.[7][8] That's a first step in providing their functionality to Android users, too.
The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201802` keyword in our bug tracker.[9]
In March we hope to make further progress on patch uplifting and toolchain updates, and we will be at the dev meeting to plan for the next six months including the Tor Browser 8 release. We hope to get back to our user interface improvements which are still in the pipeline (e.g. circuit display updates[10]) while starting the countdown for Tor Browser 8 preparations: that includes finishing the rebase of our remaining patches to ESR 60 and writing new patches to address compatibility requirements and new "features" coming with the new Firefox version.
All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201803` keyword in our bug tracker.[11]
[1] https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-80a2-released [2] https://bugs.torproject.org/23136 [3] https://bugs.torproject.org/16472 [4] https://bugs.torproject.org/25304 [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/21777 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/19675 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/25013 [8] https://bugs.torproject.org/25260 [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [10] https://bugs.torproject.org/24309 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...