The Tor Project has officially announced public availability of Tor Messenger 0.3.0b1, latest development release of cross-platform supported, secure chat client that makes use of tor network. It support various transport networks like XMPP, IRC, Twitter ..etc.
Tor Messenger is still under development and hence the team encourages to not use it if you are looking for extreme secure, anonymous chat client. Tor Messenger 0.3.0b1 is coming with improved security and stability of instabird. Beginning from this release, Tor Messenger will be built on Tor Browser instead of Mozilla ESR. This will offer improved security by making use of tor browser patches. Also, the team is planning to release messenger in sync with tor browser release cycle.
Considering the security benefits, Tor project recommends immediate update to new release. Existing users of Tor Messenger 0.2.0b2 will get option to update their installation.
From a release announcement published in Tor blog.:
Tor Messenger is still under development and hence the team encourages to not use it if you are looking for extreme secure, anonymous chat client. Tor Messenger 0.3.0b1 is coming with improved security and stability of instabird. Beginning from this release, Tor Messenger will be built on Tor Browser instead of Mozilla ESR. This will offer improved security by making use of tor browser patches. Also, the team is planning to release messenger in sync with tor browser release cycle.
Considering the security benefits, Tor project recommends immediate update to new release. Existing users of Tor Messenger 0.2.0b2 will get option to update their installation.
From a release announcement published in Tor blog.:
We are pleased to announce another public beta release of Tor Messenger. This release features important improvements to the stability and security of Instantbird. All users are highly encouraged to upgrade.
Tor Browser Build
Starting with this release, Tor Messenger will be built on top of Tor Browser instead of Mozilla ESR. This will help us in improving the security of Tor Messenger by making use of Tor Browser's patches. We will also try to keep in sync with the Tor Browser stable release cycle.
Secure Updates
Tor Messenger 0.2.0b2 users will be automatically prompted to install the update (similar to Tor Browser). On installing and restarting, the update will be applied; your account settings and OTR keys will be preserved.