Tor Browser 8.5a9 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

Note: this is an alpha release: an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommended downloading the latest stable release instead.

This release features important security updates to Firefox.

This new Tor Browser version picks up Firefox security bug fixes coming with Firefox 60.6.0esr and ships the second alpha in Tor's 0.4.0 series, 0.4.0.2-alpha. Besides those and other regular component updates (e.g. OpenSSL to 1.0.2r), we are proud to give three major features wider testing in our alpha series:

Firstly, for our desktop users, we redesigned our security controls, exposing the security slider state directly on our reorganized toolbar. The current code implements large parts of proposal 101, and we hope we make the overall experience less confusing that way, especially for inexperienced users. Thanks to Richard for all the hard work on this!

Secondly, we redesigned our bootstrapping interface for Tor Browser on Android, giving what we hope is a similar experience to the one provided for desktop versions. This is the first big part in our efforts to drop our dependency on Orbot while still making bootstrapping progress and bridge/pluggable transport configuration easily accessible. Thanks to Matt for all the work on this feature!

Thirdly, we implemented pluggable transport support for our mobile users, allowing them to bypass censorship with the help of obfs3, obfs4, and meek. It is possible to use both built-in bridges and custom ones, which users can obtain e.g. from BridgeDB or friends.

The full changelog since Tor Browser 8.5a8 is: