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The Tor Project announced today the release and general availability of Tor Browser 11.0, the latest and greatest stable version of their anonymous web browser based on Mozilla Firefox and the Tor project.
More than a year in the works, Tor Browser 11 web browser is finally here, ready to be used by those who want to protect their privacy by staying anonymous online while surfing the World Wide Web.
Based on the Mozilla Firefox 91 ESR (Extended Support Release) web browser series and the Tor 0.4.6.8 open-source and free software for enabling anonymous communications, Tor Browser 11 introduces a brand-new look borrowed from Firefox 91.
Almost every single UI element in the Tor Browser was updated in this release, including the typography, color, and buttons to match the new thinner icon style and Firefox’s new Proton UI with a dark mode theme.
The new look offers a simplified browser chrome, streamlined menus, and an all-new tab design. In addition, the circuit display, connection screen, security levels, and onion site errors got updated too with some much-needed quality of life improvements.
“To ensure it lives up to the new experience, each piece of custom UI in Tor Browser has been modernized to match Firefox’s new look and feel,” said the devs.
Apart from the new look and feel, Tor Browser 11 is the first stable release of this anonymous web browser to fully deprecate the v2 onion services. Since Tor 0.4.6.8 is now used by default, v2 onion address are no longer reachable and users will see an “Invalid Onion Site Address” error message instead.
If you relied on site that uses the v2 onion services, you should notify the maintainer(s) to upgrade to a v3 onion service as soon as possible. The new v3 addresses use 56 characters, compared to the 16 characters used in v2 addresses, so you should be able to easy spot an old v2 address in your bookmarks.
Under the hood, Tor Browser 11 is built for GNU/Linux distributions using GCC 10.3.0, and the Linux toolchain has been updated to switch to mozilla91. Other than that, the RLBox sandboxing API has been temporary disabled for the Linux binary, which you can download right now from the official website.
Over three dozen bugs were addresses in this major update to make Tor Browser more stable and reliable, but some known issues are still present, such as the fact that fonts won’t render correctly when launching the app using the start-tor-browser script (as a workaround, you should launch it with the firefox script instead).
Most probably, some of these pesky issues will be fixed in an upcoming point release, but, until then, enjoy your online privacy with the brand-new Tor Browser 11 and its prettier user interface.
Last updated 2 years ago
