Download Tor Browser 7.0

Version 7.0 of Tor Browser has been released. Tor stands for The Onion Router and is a network that can be used to surf the Internet fairly anonymously. All users’ tcp traffic is routed through various Tor routers, after which it is virtually impossible for the recipient to trace who the original sender was. This information is still present within the Tor network, so that answers, of course also via the system of routers, eventually arrive at the right place. This release is based on the Extended Support Release of Firefox version 52 and comes with the following notes:

Tor Browser 7.0 has been released

The Tor Browser Team is proud to announce the first stable release in the 7.0 series. This release brings us up to date with Firefox 52 ESR which contains progress in a number of areas.

Most notably we hope having Mozilla’s multiprocess mode (e10s) and content sandbox enabled will be one of the major new features in the Tor Browser 7.0 series, both security- and performance-wise. While we are still working on the sandboxing part for Windows (the e10s part is ready), both Linux and macOS have e10s and content sandboxing enabled by default in Tor Browser 7.0. In addition to that, Linux and macOS users have the option to further harden their Tor Browser setup by using only Unix Domain sockets for communication with tor.

The highlights in our tracking and fingerprinting resistance improvements are: cookies, view-source requests and the Permissions API are isolated to the first party URL bar domain now to enhance our tracking related defenses. On the fingerprinting side we disabled and/or patched several new features, among them WebGL2, the WebAudio, Social, SpeechSynthesis, and Touch APIs, and the MediaError.message property.

With the switch to ESR 52 come new system requirements for Windows and macOS users: On Windows Tor Browser 7.0 won’t run on non-SSE2 capable machines anymore. On Apple computers OS X 10.9 is now the minimum system requirement.

Besides new system requirements for Windows and macOS users, there are some known issues with Tor Browser 7.0 as well:

• Mozilla stopped ALSA support in Firefox 52 for Linux users. This means without having PulseAudio available, sound will be broken in Tor Browser 7.0 on Linux.
• the download button in the PDF viewer is currently broken. A workaround for this bug is right-clicking on the PDF file and choosing the “Save as” option.
• Tor Browser has recently been freezing on some websites. This is related to a NoScript bug which will hopefully get addressed in a new NoScript version rather soon. If not then we’ll ship a workaround for it in the planned Tor Browser 7.0.1 which will update Firefox to 52.2.0esr next week.

Apart from switching to the new Firefox ESR and dealing with related issues we included a new Tor stable version (0.3.0.7) and updated our NoScript (5.0.5) and HTTPS-Everywhere versions (5.2.17).

We updated our toolchains during the ESR transition as well. In particular we retired the old GCC-based one for our macOS cross-compilation and rely solely on clang/cctools now.