Hello!

In June we released 5 Tor Browser releases: 8.5.1[1], 9.0a2[2], 8.5.2[3], 8.5.3[4], and 9.0a3[5].

The last three were due to two chemspill releases Mozilla managed to do while they had their All Hands meeting in Whistler (Canada) and a group of Tor people attended as well, to discuss both further uplift + fingerprinting work and performance + scalability improvements.

Tor Browser 8.5.1 was the first bugfix release in the 8.5 series which fixed minor shortcomings in 8.5 and defended against the readPixel() fingerprining vector[6].

Tor Browser 9.0a2 contained all the fixes that went into 8.5.1 and additionally bumped several components in our bundle (Tor on desktop to 0.4.1.2-alpha, OpenSSL on desktop to 1.1.1c) and in our toolchain and compilation environments (GCC to 8.3.0 for Linux, Debian Stretch for macOS cross-compilation), in preparation for the upcoming 9.0 release.

Non-release related work mostly comprised progress on our work on onion service authentication support. First testing bundles are available.[7] Moreover, we rebased most of our patches for ESR 68 and they got a first round of review[8], and our toolchains for Linux[9] and macOS[10] are mostly ready. We made considerable progress on integrating Snowflake for Android into our reproducible build system[11], although we are still a bit away from getting this shipped to users as some glue code is so far missing.[12] Another highlight that month was our fixed accessibility support for Windows users, which Richard achieved after weeks of hard work (thanks!). It is included in the first alpha for July, 9.0a4.

The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in June is accessible using the `TorBrowserTeam201906` keyword in our bug tracker.[13]

For July, we attended the Tor dev meeting in Stockholm to think about upcoming work in the next month but, above all, to better coordinate all the ESR transition work under way. The whole team is currently working to get first nightly builds out[14] which are based on Firefox 68 ESR, which essentially means toolchain updates and patch rebase and review. We hope we'll have the latter finished by end of July so that we can ship the first nightly builds based on Firefox 68 ESR in early August. As usual it will probbably be Linux bunldes first with the other platforms being added as soon as the toolchains are in reasonable shape. So, stay tuned!

All tickets on our radar for this month can be seen with the `TorBrowserTeam201907` keyword in our bug tracker.[15]

Georg

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-851 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-90a2 [3] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-852 [4] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-853 [5] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-90a3 [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30541 [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30237#comment:19 [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30429 [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30321 [10] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30323 [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28672 [12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30318 [13] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~T... [14] Nightly blockers are tagged with `tbb-9.0-must-nightly` in our bug tracker: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&keywords=~... [15] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=accepted&status=as...