by morgan | August 28, 2024
Tor Browser 14.0a3 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version includes important security updates to Firefox.
ESR Progress
As discussed in our previous blog post, we are hard at work updating Tor Browser to the Firefox ESR-128.
Now that we have all of our platforms rebased and building, we will be making (roughtly) weekly releases until the final 14.0 release in September.
Android APK Size Reduction
Over the past week we have made some progress on the Android APK size front, but we have not yet reduced the size beneath Google Play's threshold. So far we have shaved off about a megabyte by removing unused assets from the Android build.
In the short-term, we will likely be removing the Conjure pluggable-transport from our x86 and x86_64 Android builds. This pluggable-transport is still in testing and none of our built-in bridges depend on it, so the vast majority of users would be unaffected by its removal. We will also be removing tor's unused Geoip database (used on Desktop for the circuit-display) from all Android builds. Neither of these are long-term solutions, but should be good enough for the 14.0 series.
We are also prototyping integrating UPX into our Android builds to reduce our executable sizes. We would prefer to not include this in our final release, due to potential performance regressions and reproducibility issues, though initial tests suggests neither are currently a problem.
Desktop Styling Fixes
After a year of upstream changes, Tor Browser's user-interface patches tend to get a little 'dusty'. Styling choices which looked right in ESR-115 may now look a little off in ESR-128, pages may reference css rules which no longer exist, or we may be using colours which have since have been altered upstream. So, we've been working the past few releases on various patches to clean up these rough edges and polishing all of Tor Browser's custom frontend elements.
If you happen to find any Tor Browser UI which looks a bit off or could use some polish, please send us your feedback!
Bugzilla Triage and Review
We have 180 remaining upstream Bugzilla issues to review and potentially develop patches for.
This work can be tracked in this Gitlab query.
Send us your feedback
If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.
Known Issues
There are a few known issues which we are aware of.
No Tor Browser 14.0a2 for x86 and x86_64 on Google Play StoreOur alpha release exceeds the Google Play Store's limit on APK size for x86 and x86_64 devices. This is being tracked here:
Full changelog
The full changelog since Tor Browser 14.0a2 is:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.torproject.org/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-140a3
