Hi everyone!
Here is my status report for September 2024.
I dedicated a consistent part of this month to various tasks to fix regressions we got after migrating to Firefox 128 or for refinements.
I started by re-implementing our search engine customization.
Upstream themselves reworked their configuration, so I ended up reverting our previous patch and implementing a new one [0].
While at it, I removed some search engines we used to bundle by default, such as Yahoo and Twitter.
I also re-implemented the functionality to send DuckDuckGo searches through its HTML-only version when running at the safest security level [1].
After doing this for Tor Browser, I wrote similar patches for Mullvad Browser [2].
After that, I worked on the Android part of our build system. I removed the Lox WASM blob [3], which isn't currently used on Android. This allowed us to ship x86 APKs on the Play Store again.
Then, I simulated a release build to check they don't fail when we're close to the release period. However, they didn't work, and I had to fix our dependency list [4].
Also, I fixed single-arch Android test builds [5].
Then, I focused on a disk leak problem. Firefox downloads and opens some formats in the browser without asking for confirmation by default when the server sends them as attachments.
There's a preference for force-inlining PDFs (browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline), but it doesn't work on other formats. Therefore, I extended that functionality, but I'm not completely satisfied. In our issue [6], I documented all the various problems we still have. However, I will need more time and some help from upstream to provide a better fix.
I also went back to one of my passions: fonts. I investigated the differences between having and not having our custom font configuration on Linux [7], and I thought of some strategies for 14.5, as we are too late for 14.0. For now, I created some font aliases to improve compatibility and updated our bundled fonts.
In addition to that, I helped with releasing. I rebased our browsers onto Firefox 115.16.0esr and 128.3.0esr. Also, I prepared 13.5.3 and 13.5a10. The latter was an unplanned alpha release from a legacy branch to test the watershed update procedure, which we need to provide alternative updates for legacy platforms (Windows 7/8 and macOS up to 10.14).
Finally, I attended the Reproducible Build Summit in Hamburg [8]. I joined the group that focused on writing documentation for repro build beginners.
Best,
Pier
[0] Bug 41835, 42891, 43105: Cleanup on the search engines (!1162) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[1] Restore the HTML form on DDG when using safest in 128 (#42617) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[2] Provide search engine icons (#328) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Mullvad Browser · GitLab
[3] Bug 42607 (part): Do not ship the Lox wasm blob on Android. (!1174) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[4] More dependencies are needed when building Android as a release (#41234) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
[5] Re-implement single-arch builds after the monorepo migration (#41232) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
[6] Flip all the possible preferences to prevent any automatic download (#42220) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[7] Make lack of fonts.conf less of a footgun (#41799) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
[8] Hamburg 2024 — reproducible-builds.org
···
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