In February, the Tor Browser team released 4.0.4[1] and 4.5-alpha-4[2]. The 4.0.4 release was a point release in the 4.0 stable series, and updated Firefox to the latest point release on the ESR series. We also updated NoScript, removed a spurious NoScript menu option[3], and landed a fix to prevent meek transport users from seeing multiple update notification windows (due to meek actually running a second instance of Tor Browser to handle TLS camouflage)[4].
The 4.5-alpha-4 release additionally featured updates to Tor to 0.2.6.3-alpha, fully signed incremental updates, and several improvements to usability. The usability improvements were driven by the results of the usability sprint at the end of last month[5]. In particular, the Torbutton onion menu and related preference windows have been overhauled to provide more simplicity and more focus[6,7,8,9]. The onion menu now features a much requested "New Circuit for this site" option[10], and the security and privacy settings window have been simplified[11]. For censored users, the first run configuration wizard was also improved to present the choice of Pluggable Transport before the local proxy information, in an effort to avoid confusion between Pluggable Transports and local proxies[12]. The browser now also warns users before closing their windows on New Identity[13], and informs them that a restart is needed to enable/disable disk history records[14]. As can be seen from the changelog on the release post, the release contains several other usability tweaks and enhancements as well. With these releases, we also completed our transition away from Erinn Clark's GPG key for purposes of signing the individual Tor Browser release files. Both series are now signed with a new Tor Browser key, as documented on our signature verification page[15]. The new fingerprint is EF6E 286D DA85 EA2A 4BA7 DE68 4E2C 6E87 9329 8290. Both the GPG and the update signatures are created using an offline signing process, as outlined in our Release Process documentation[16]. On the QA and testing front, it is now possible for Tor Browser developers who have a Tor LDAP account to request automated testing of their own builds[17]. This process is documented in the Tor Browser Hacking document[18]. The full list of tickets closed by the Tor Browser team in February can be seen using the TorBrowserTeam201502 tag on our bug tracker[19]. In March, we will wrap up our work on 4.5-alpha, with one final alpha release occurring on March 31st. The 4.5 series will then become stable in mid-April. The list of tickets on our radar for the 4.5 release is available by viewing the tbb-4.5-alpha tag[20]. As usual, the full list of tickets that the Tor Browser team plans to work on in March can be seen using the TorBrowserTeam201503 tag on our bug tracker[21]. 1. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-404-released 2. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-45a4-released 3. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14849 4. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14203 5. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ux-sprint-2015-wrapup 6. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/11175 7. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14632 8. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13406 9. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5698 10. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9442 11. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14630 12. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13271 13. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9906 14. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8400 15. https://www.torproject.org/docs/verifying-signatures.html.en 16. https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-browser-spec.git/tree/processes/ReleaseProcess 17. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12222 18. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowser/Hacking#Requestingtestingofacustombuildusingthetbb-qa.ymlfile 19. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=closed&keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201502 20. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~tbb-4.5-alpha&status=!closed 21. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~TorBrowserTeam201502 -- Mike Perry
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