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Help Tor users everywhere—volunteer as an alpha tester

Tor Browser receives hundreds of changes a year: from updates to Firefox – the underlying browser on which Tor Browser is based – to entirely new features designed to help protect at-risk and censored users. However, each change made to Tor Browser has the potential to introduce new and sometimes elusive bugs.

In order to find and fix these bugs before they reach the majority of our users, we apply updates to an early version of Tor Browser known as Tor Browser Alpha before releasing them more widely. Then, as a small nonprofit, we rely on a community of volunteer testers to try out our alphas before their general release in order to keep Tor Browser available on so many platforms.

Volunteering to become an alpha tester is one of the most accessible and effective ways you can help at-risk users stay connected to Tor.

By spending a few minutes testing each new alpha release and reporting bugs back to our developers, you'll help provide a more stable Tor Browser for millions of users around the world. Join our community as an alpha tester and help users everywhere safely access Tor.

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Update on slow speed and overload on the Tor network

Over the past several weeks, a DDoS attack has targeted the Tor network. You may have noticed an impact on Tor performance. We've deployed improvements to help mitigate this attack, which have helped user experience, along with waning overload. As the ongoing DDoS attack strategy changes, we continue to investigate and implement mitigations. For more details, see our thread on the Tor Forum and feel free to join the discussion.

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Coming soon: Tor Browser 11.5 👀

Big changes to routing around censorship against Tor are coming to Tor Browser 11.5, slated for release at the end of July. Keep your eyes open for the reveal of Connection Assist, a brand-new feature that makes discovering censorship against Tor Browser, and understanding what to do about it, much easier.

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Arti 0.5.0 is released: Robustness and API improvements

Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. Arti 0.5.0 adds cryptographic acceleration, a useful set of toplevel build features, reachable-address filtering, detection for failed directory downloads, and numerous cleanups.

What's next? In the short term, we're working for feature-parity with Tor in netflow resistance and congestion control. We already have some backend code, but a complete implementation will take a while. Beyond that, between now and our 1.0.0 milestone in September, we're aiming to make Arti a production-quality Tor client for direct internet access.

We need your help to test Arti, find bugs, and suggest improvements! Visit our blog for more details about Arti 0.5.0 and how to get involved.