Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for October 2024.
Ten days ago, we finally released Tor Browser 14.0 after several months of work on it 
[0].
Therefore, in the first weeks of October, I mostly fixed minor bugs/details and tried to help my colleagues resolve other problems for the big release.
I also spent a considerable amount of time doing QA. While doing it, I created new resources to make the QA process faster.
I added all of them to the tests for self-signed HTTPS Onion Sites I created a while ago [1].
I also restarted my upstream effort. I think the upstreaming of Bug 1556002 [2] and Bug 1923264 [3] were the fastest I have ever had 
.
I also tried to start a conversation about ignoring `content-disposition: attachment` in some cases [4], but that will need more work downstream first.
After the release, I returned to working on issues we didn't want to rush for the stable, such as moving FontConfig's fonts.conf [5].
While doing so, I also found a compatibility problem between the modern Python version we self-compile to be able to build Firefox and the legacy OpenSSL version we still have in our old build environment [6].
I fixed it by downgrading Python to 3.9.20, which is still officially supported by the PSF and the various build systems we use. That was the less-impacting solution, but not the only possible one. Also, we really needed to fix it quickly, as it would have prevented us from building 14.0.1.
Currently, I am working on fixing the "Proxy server refuses connection" problem that some Android devices (mostly Samsung phones) show [7].
I think a workaround would be to return to TCP sockets for the SOCKS connections. I prefer Unix domain sockets, as they can be used only by the browser with our configuration, whereas TCP sockets will be available to other apps as well, which is a linkability concern.
If you have an Android device with this behavior and think you can help debug it, please consider commenting on that GitLab issue [7].
With this effort, we will also get closer to solving an 11-year-old issue, a new record for me [8].
Finally, I did the usual maintenance work. I rebased our browsers (the 128-based stable and the 115-based legacy channel) and started the new branches for the 14.5 series.
I also prepared the 14.0.1 Tor Browser stable release and built it.
Best,
Pier
[0] New Release: Tor Browser 14.0 | The Tor Project
[1] https://onion-tests.pierov.org/
[2] 1556002 - Change the Initial Window Size Resolution to use the same Stepped Resolution as Letterboxing
[3] 1923264 - The update selection could check for unsupported updates
[4] 1923368 - Extend browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to other file types
[5] Ship our FontConfig configuration with the browser (#43140) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[6] Add SSL to our custom Python for MozBug 1924022 (#41282) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
[7] Some Samsung users receiving "proxy refused" error when visiting websites (#42714) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[8] Allow TBB 3.x to run multiple times in parallel (#10439) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-launcher · GitLab
···
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