Tor Browser 8.0a9 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

This release features important security updates to Firefox.

Tor Browser 8.0a9 is the first alpha release based on Firefox 60 ESR. We rebased all of our patches, updated our toolchains to pick up new requirements like Rust support, and fixed the most important usability issues and broken functionality.

We rely on your feedback to make Tor Browser better for users around the world. Releasing a Tor Browser alpha before each stable release gives us a valuable window of time to learn about and fix bugs before the stable release is used by millions.

New Features

If you are comfortable with Tor Browser, we need your help! This alpha has a lot of new features, including a couple major UX changes, and we want them to be in tip-top shape before the stable release hits this September. Here's a taste of what's new:

Improved Circuit Display: We've heard a lot of confusion about how the first guard in the Tor Circuit Display stays the same for months, even if you select "New Identity." This is by design, so now, we're trying to to better communicate that to the user and better manage expectations about both "New Identity" and "New Tor Circuit for this Site." Onion Indicators: We're trying out a new system for indicating .onion sites' relationships to TLS certificates. We mapped all the current padlock states Firefox has for sites' TLS certificates, and from there, we've built a new system for communicating these states when they are related to .onion sites. New Locales: We added support for da, he, sv-SE, and zh-TW to give users speaking those languages an improved Tor Browser experience. The plan is to add even more locales once we are confident we can handle the additional load and disk space requirements. New Torbutton Icon: We replaced our old Torbutton icon with a shiny new one. That's the first step in redesigning Tor Browser icons and making them compatible with Firefox's Photon UI. There is more to come in the next alphas. Full Sandboxing Support for Windows: We are able to provide full content sandboxing support for 64bit Windows bundles now, thanks to the work done by Tom Ritter.

Additionally, we updated a number of components we ship: Tor to 0.3.4.2-alpha, Torbutton to 2.0.1, TorLauncher to 0.2.16.1, HTTPS-Everywhere to 2018.06.21, and NoScript to 10.1.8.2. Expect more bugs than usual in this alpha.

Known Issues

We already collected a number of unresolved bugs in 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:

Give Feedback and Report Bugs

If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve these changes, please let us know. There are several ways you can reach us with feedback about this alpha including commenting on this post, emailing us at frontdesk@torproject.org, or contacting the developers at the tbb-dev mailing list. We track all Tor Browser 8 related issues with the ff60-esr keyword in our bug tracker and are happy with bug reports, there, too. Be sure to include as many of these as possible:

Your OS

Tor Browser version

Step by step of how you got to the issue, so we can reproduce it (e.g. I opened the browser, typed a url, clicked on (i) icon, then my browser crashed)

A screenshot of the problem

The debug log

A descriptive subject line (if you're emailing us)

Thank you for your support!

Changelog

Note: This alpha release is the first 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 8.0a8 is: