The Tor Browser Team is proud to announce the first stable release in the 6.0 series. This release is available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

This release brings us up to date with Firefox 45-ESR, which should mean a better support for HTML5 video on Youtube, as well as a host of other improvements.

Beginning with the 6.0 series code-signing for OS X systems is introduced. This should help our users who had trouble with getting Tor Browser to work on their Mac due to Gatekeeper interference. There were bundle layout changes necessary to adhere to code signing requirements but the transition to the new Tor Browser layout on disk should go smoothly.

The release also features new privacy enhancements and disables features where we either did not have the time to write a proper fix or where we decided they are rather potentially harmful in a Tor Browser context.

On the security side this release makes sure that SHA1 certificate support is disabled and our updater is not only relying on the signature alone but is checking the hash of the downloaded update file as well before applying it. Moreover, we provide a fix for a Windows installer related DLL hijacking vulnerability.

A note on our search engine situation: Lately, we got a couple of comments on our blog and via email wondering why we are now using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine and not Disconnect anymore. Well, we still use Disconnect. But for a while now Disconnect has no access to Google search results anymore which we used in Tor Browser. Disconnect being more a meta search engine which allows users to choose between different search providers fell back to delivering Bing search results which were basically unacceptable quality-wise. While Disconnect is still trying to fix the situation we asked them to change the fallback to DuckDuckGo as their search results are strictly better than the ones Bing delivers.

Update: We plan to post instructions for removing the OS X code signing parts on our website soon. This should make it easier to compare the OS X bundles we build with the actual bundles we ship.

The full changelog since Tor Browser 5.5.5 is:

Tor Browser 6.0 -- May 30