Update (8/21 7:45UTC): We got reports from users facing a weird update behavior: even after successfully applying an update to 8.0a10 the updater keeps downloading and applying updates. This is tracked in bug 27221. As a workaround, please either use a fresh 8.0a10 or go to about:config , search for 8.0a9 . browser.startup.homepage_override.torbrowser.version and extensions.lastTorBrowserVersion will show up. Switch their values to 8.0a10 . Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 2 (8/23 16:20UTC): Today NoScript 10.1.8.17 got released which broke the security slider interaction due to a new messaging protocol. We fixed this problem in bug 27276 and the patch will be available in the Tor Browser 8 release. However, there is no alpha release planned to pick up this fix. Users that depend on the security slider functionality are encouraged to use the stable Tor Browser or a nightly version (starting with the one from tomorrow, August 24) until Tor Browser 8 and the next regular alpha release get out. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Tor Browser 8.0a10 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

It is the second alpha release based on Firefox ESR 60 and contains a number of improvements and bug fixes. The highlights are the following features and major bug fixes:

This alpha includes big changes to the user onboarding experience, and there are more to come.

We included a revamped start page (special thanks to Mark and Kathy for the implementation on short notice). The meek pluggable transport should be fully functional now. We audited and enabled HTTP2 which should give performance improvements on many websites. We added another bunch of locales and ship our bundles now additionally in ca, ga-IE, id, is, and nb-NO.

For Windows users we worked around a bug in mingw-w64 which affected updates on Windows (64bit) resulting in intermittent update failures. Moreover, we finally enabled hardware acceleration for improved browser rendering performance after applying a fix for a long-standing bug, which often caused crashes on Windows systems with graphics cards, e.g. from Nvidia.

The Tor version we ship is now 0.3.4.6-rc and it would be a good time now to report client issues, noticed with this release candidate or previous alpha releases, in case they did not get fixed so far.

Known Issues

We already collected a number of unresolved bugs since Tor Browser 8.0a9 and tagged them with our ff60-esr keyword to keep them on our radar. The most important ones are listed below:

On Windows localized builds on first start the about:tor page is not shown, rather a weird XML error is visible. Maybe related to the previous item, NoScript does not seem to work properly on Windows builds right now. We are not done yet with reviewing the network code changes between ESR52 and ESR60. While we don't expect that proxy bypass bugs got introduced between those ESR series, we can't rule it out yet. We disable Stylo on macOS due to reproducibility issues we need to investigate and fix. This will likely not get fixed for Tor Browser 8, as we need some baking time on our nightly/alpha channel before we are sure there are no reproducibility/stability regressions. The tentative plan is to get it ready for Tor Browser 8.5.

Note: This alpha release is the second one that gets signed with a new Tor Browser subkey, as the currently used one is about to expire. Its fingerprint is: 1107 75B5 D101 FB36 BC6C 911B EB77 4491 D9FF 06E2 . We plan to use it for the stable series, too, once Tor Browser 8 gets released.

The full changelog since Tor Browser 8.0a9 is: