Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for November 2024.
November was a short month for us, as we took a team break to rest a bit after the big 14.0 release and because of the holidays.
For most of the month, I investigated how to remove Lox's WASM blob and instead integrate the Lox Rust crate in the browser build system [0]. Also, I checked the various options for exposing this integration crate to JavaScript, as the front end will remain in that language.
This work will hopefully help us also when switching to Arti in the browser.
We've also discussed the future changes for the Tor daemon integration in the browser, and I had to review a major refactor made by Henry [1], which took me some time.
Apart from that, I rebased our 128-based channels (14.0 and 14.5), fixed the release preparation script to take the needs of the legacy channel into account [2], and made other similar fixes [3].
Also, I signed a release (13.5.10) for the first time. We decided to allow more people to sign to be more responsive under some circumstances and to spread the load on the team.
Then, towards the end of the month, I resumed the work on anti-fingerprinting. I evaluated Thorin's proposal to abandon `font.system.whitelist` in favor of font visibility, which would bring us closer to Firefox [4]. While doing so, I found a problem with the changes I made to the FontConfig configuration file the previous month [5].
Finally, I proposed a fix for a conflict between the OpenSSL 3.0.x we ship with the tor daemon, and OpenSSL 3.2.x, required by a transitive dependency, which prevented the browser from starting in some systems [6]. If you have the same problem, deleting our libcrypto (form `TorBrowser/Tor`) should work, but we'll provide a proper fix in our next update.
Best,
Pier
[0] Consider dropping Lox's WASM (#43096) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[1] Manage the shown user stage in TorConnect module (!1264) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[2] Update relprep.py in maint-13.5 (#41310) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
[3] Bug 41284&41315: Fix some problems on relprep.py (!1100) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
[4] compat: stop blocking all fonts in FontFace (#43322) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[5] System fonts leak when emptying the allow list on Linux (#43330) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[6] Launching tor-browser on gentoo fails with "version `OPENSSL_3.2.0' not found" (#43326) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
···
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