New Release: Tor Browser 13.0.8 (Desktop)

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by richard | December 21, 2023

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Tor Browser 13.0.8 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This is an emergency desktop-only release which fixes a crash in pluggable transports for Windows 7 users. The most recent Go toolchain update seems to have finally broken Windows 7 suport (see golang/go/#57003 for background). We have downgraded our lyrebird, conjure, and webtunnel pluggable transports to the 1.20 series and they should be working once more on older Windows systems. Unfortunately, the snowflake pluggable transport depends on the 1.21 series to work, so it will remain broken on these systems.

We highly encourage Tor Browser users who are still on Windows 7 or 8 to either upgrade their systems to a modern Linux distribution, or at least to a supported version of Windows (10 or higher). Tor Browser will neccessarily have to drop support for Windows 7 and 8 after the ESR 128 transition next year, as Mozilla's minimum Windows operating system requirements is now Windows 10 or newer as of Firefox 116.

Send us your feedback

If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 13.0.7 is:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-1308
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I’m one of the Tor Browser’s on Windows 7 users who got affected by the botched 13.0.7 release: couple of days ago my Tor Browser updated to it and stopped working. And it can’t update to 13.0.8 since it’s unable to find updates because it doesn’t connects to the TOR. So how should I update??? I don’t want to reinstall browser completely because I don’t want to loose my settings and extensions.

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just reinstall to the same path - it doesn’t overwrite the profile directory

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A trick:

Once you have a good working version of Tor, copy the whole folder to a USB stick. The next time you update and there is a problem, you can then delete the folder from your desktop and copy the saved folder back to the destop.

if you go through another cycle of backups to the USB stick, remember to either rename the copy on the USB or delete it.

5

I’m on Win 7 as well and had the same issue.

Backup this directory which contains all your extensions(and configurations) and profile - Tor Browser/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser

Delete your base “Tor Browser” directory.

Download and install the fixed 13.0.8 version from - https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/13.0.8/tor-browser-windows-x86_64-portable-13.0.8.exe

Merge the Browser folder that you backed up into the new Tor Browser/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/

Everything will work again.

Cheers!

PS: It’s unlikely that I will be upgrading to Windows 10/11 . I’m gonna be on the lookout for Firefox ESR forks that will work on Windows 7, whose signature I may then modify to make it look like the official Tor Browser. And have it connect to the tor network using tor-expert-bundle.
Now if tor-expert-bundle stops working on Win 7, that’s when we’re doomed.