The Tor Project has announced release of Tor Browser 7.5, latest stable release of secure web browser suite based on Firefox that provides anonymity and protect your privacy while browsing internet. This release of Tor Browser brings various security updates from Mozilla Firefox. It also includes several other notable changes.
The Tor Browser 7.5 includes a redesigned UI to provide a better and easy user experience. The UI redesign was done based on a paper published on A Usability Evaluation of Tor Browser. The Tor Project has taken the suggestions proposed in this paper to next level and it has been implemented.
Following are some notable visual changes that users can experience on Tor Browser 7.5.
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| Tor Browser 7.5 release announcement |
The Tor Browser 7.5 includes a redesigned UI to provide a better and easy user experience. The UI redesign was done based on a paper published on A Usability Evaluation of Tor Browser. The Tor Project has taken the suggestions proposed in this paper to next level and it has been implemented.
Following are some notable visual changes that users can experience on Tor Browser 7.5.
- Redesigned Welcome Screen : Our old screen had way too much information for the users, leading many of them to spend great time confused about what to do. Some users at the paper experiment spent up to 40min confused about what they needed to be doing here. Besides simplifying the screen and the message, to make it easier for the user to know if they need to configure anything or not, we also did a 'brand refresh' bringing our logo to the launcher.
- Configuring Censorship Circumvention : This is one of the most important steps for a user who is trying to connect to Tor while their network is censoring Tor. We also worked really hard to make sure the UI text would make it easy for the user to understand what a bridge is for and how to configure to use one. Another update was a little tip we added at the drop-down menu (as you can see below) for which bridge to use in countries that have very sophisticated censorship methods.
- More documentation on configuring proxy network : The proxy settings at our Tor Launcher configuration wizard is an important feature for users who are under a network that demands such configuration. But it can also lead to a lot of confusion if the user has no idea what a proxy is. Since it is a very important feature for users, we decided to keep it in the main configuration screen and introduced a help prompt with an explanation of when someone would need such configuration.
In addition to the user interface improvements, there are some other notable highlights in Tor Browser 7.5.
For a comprehensive yet complete list of changes in Tor Browser 7.5 comparing to it's ancestor Tor Browser 7.0, see Tor Browser 7.5 release announcement published in project's website.
- We ship the first release in Tor's 0.3.2 series, 0.3.2.9. This release includes support for the Next Generation of Onion Services.
- On the security side we enabled content sandboxing on Windows and fixed remaining issues on Linux that prevented printing to file from working properly. Additionally, we improved the compiler hardening on macOS and fixed holes in the W^X mitigation on Windows.
- We finally moved away from Gitian/tor-browser-bundle as the base of our reproducible builds environment. Over the past weeks and months rbm/tor-browser-build got developed making it much easier to reproduce Tor Browser builds and to add reproducible builds for new platforms and architectures. This will allow us to ship 64bit bundles for Windows (currently in the alpha series available) and bundles for Android at the same day as the release for the current platforms/architectures is getting out.