Tor Browser Bundle 3.5 is released

Update 12/20: Test builds of Pluggable Transport bundles are now available. See inline and see the FAQ link for more details.

The 2.x stable series of the Tor Browser Bundle has officially been deprecated, and all users are encouraged to upgrade to the 3.5 series.

Packages are now available from the Tor download page as well as the Tor Package archive.

For now, the Pluggable Transports-capable TBB is still a separate package, maintained by David Fifield. Download them here: https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/pt-bundle/3.5-pt20131217/. We hope to have combined packages available in a beta soon.

For people already using TBB 3.5rc1, the changes are not substantial, and are included below.

However, for users of TBB 2.x and 3.0, this release includes important security updates to Firefox. All users are strongly encouraged to update immediately, as we will not be making further releases in the 2.x or 3.0 series.

In terms of user-facing changes from TBB 2.x, the 3.x series primarily features the replacement of Vidalia with a Firefox-based Tor controller called Tor Launcher. This has resulted in a vast decrease in startup times, and a vast increase in usability. We have also begun work on an FAQ page to handle common questions arising from this transition -- where Vidalia went, how to disable JavaScript, how to check signatures, etc.

The complete changelog for the 3.x series describes the changes since 2.x.

The set of changes since the 3.5rc1 release is:

  • All Platforms
    • Update Tor to 0.2.4.19
    • Update Tor Launcher to 0.2.4.2
      • Bug 10382: Fix a Tor Launcher hang on TBB exit
    • Update Torbutton to 1.6.5.2
      • Misc: Switch update download URL back to download-easy
Tags
tor browser bundle
tor browser
tbb
tbb-3.0
tbb-3.5

"And when NoScript fails to block JS due to some bug in it"

How likely is that to happen? Has it ever?

Meanwhile, JavaScript is but one attack surface out of MANY others.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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Minor issue but it was a nasty surprise when the new identity button closed down all my tabs and restarted the browser instead of just fetching a new identity as it used to. At least a warning before it does that should be there. It's not easy to recover things on a browser that does not and should not recover history, forms etc. Let's not make this worse. Is the restart absolutely necessary? Thanks for the great work so far.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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How do I manually disable javascript in the FF browser? I see a thing for Java, but not JS?

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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Why isn't there a simple package without installer available? All the descriptions still say "just unzip", which is clearly wrong since you need to run an .exe now.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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When i install this 3.5 version, all the files in the folder are dated 1999

is this normal?

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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What happened to the content tab in FF? There is no javascript enable button thing there anymore. How do we reliably disable JS in the browser?

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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Don't have the 'new identity' button that's on Vidalia.
For some reason, download progress doesn't show on firefox.
Only good about this is the startup speed. Very fast!

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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What happened to Load images automatically and Enable JavaScript options in Edit > Content? May I disable JavaScript thru about:config?

I'm too very interested to find the answer!

WTF? It's most important options and no info about how to handle this through the config file or menu interface! Maybe NSA/CIA pressured you to delete this options???

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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TorButton > Cookie protections not working, no cookies there (Linux 32 and 64 bit tested, Win/Mac not tested).

Modifications on TBB:
start-tor-browser.sh: add "export TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1"
TorButton > Preferences > Socks Proxy to 127.0.0.1:9050; No proxy for 127.0.0.1, 192.168.0.0/24
NoScript > Disable Scripts Globally
Bookmarks > Show All > Restore ...

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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How to disable javascript now? There's no option anymore in "content". How to get rid of tab bar?

And is it now right way to put proxy in "preferences" 'cause there is no vidalia anymore? Generally have to say that I don't like these changes.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowserBundle3FAQ#…

A lot of the changes you don't like may well be from Firefox 24 vs Firefox 17 (which is now unmaintained).

For configuring the browser's proxy settings, click on the green onion and select "preferences" (which brings you to the browser proxy settings page).

For configuring Tor's proxy settings (e.g. if you need to go through a proxy to reach the Internet), click on the green onion and select "open network settings".

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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Two questions for the new TBB:
- how to disable Javascript in Firefox? The option is not there anymore.
- how to set Tor as a non-exit relay without Vidalia?

Thanks.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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downloaded torbrowser 3.5 for mac today but it does not work. cant connect to any webpage at all. never had such problems with any tor package before in years and have not changed any other spec on my mac running latest build mavericks.switching back to previous tor-vidalia package works as always. whats wrong here with 3.5 ?

with vidalia no more i cant even start to figure out where to start getting tor 3.5 working....

The same thing is happening to me! It lets me access the public web, and only a very limited amount of .onion sites -- basically only hidden wiki or torsearch sites. How can I fix this?

I'm having the same problem. TBB 3.5 on latest OS X does not connect to any websites. I opened a bug ticket. Hopefully we OS X users get some love from the Tor community.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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I have a problem with a new versions of TOR browser last few months.
It seems that there is some problem with the CPU priority now with tabs.
With old versions ( In the first half of this year ) when tab was downloading a new site - other tabs was run smoothly - they work with no brakes and lags .
But in a last 3 or 4 month new TOR browser versions have a nasty habit - when some page is downloading other tabs are lagging and works very slow.
Сan you fix so that other tabs don't slowing down when one tab opening or refreshing something?
PLEASE!
p.s. sorry for my terrible english, i hope you can understand me and get optimal performance browser back to normal.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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I use Tor with other applications. I have been utilizing TBB to initiate the tor connection. With the new bundle closing firefox now closes the tor connection. Where can I find a stand-alone tor application for Linux.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 20, 2013

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Can you bring back the control panel, please?, and there's a big problem when getting some new identity: all of my tabs are erased and we have to start from zero.
Thanks for this awesome and useful service!
Kind regards.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2013

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Where is the documentation for running Arm? It looks like it will provide some of the functionality/information I'm used to seeing in Vidalia. I cannot find any documentation or tutorial about how to use it.

https://www.atagar.com/arm/download.php

Your main challenge will be hooking it up to the control port, with the control port authentication, that Tor Launcher configured Tor to use.

If you pick a control port of 9151, it might just work, if it knows how to do cookie authentication.

That said, be sure you've looked at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowserBundle3FAQ#…

Once you've installed the tor-arm deb, look in /usr/share/doc/tor-arm/ for e.g. the README.

If you still have questions I suggest catching atagar on irc -- he's often happy to help, even though he's mostly moved on to working on Stem.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2013

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The close all tabs functionality is a very inconvenient feature. Scrubbing application level data is a great idea but losing the tabs introduces other problems like having to store the urls and half-completed e-mail texts on temporary files elsewhere. Huge problem for people running the tor bundle from encrypted containers. It's also a huge pain in the rear to do that often, it introduces unneeded reloads of pages which might provide some extra traffic analysis data and it also increases bandwidth usage on the tor network.

That may also be related to a bug which makes dictionaries unusable on some sites which wasn't present in the previous version.

Anonymous

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2013

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Where is Vidalia!?
There isent a control panel anymore why!?
You dont have the worldmap with a transparent view of the connections anymore.

This version hides something in the inner core.
Sorry but the new version is bullcrap!