Tor Browser 14.0 goes live - here are the biggest improvements to it

The Tor project has released version 14.0 of the Tor privacy browser with several improvements based on Firefox.

According to an announcement by the project on 23 October, this is the first stable version of Tor browser based on Firefox ESR 128, which also brings a key desktop feature to Android users.

Tapping from Firefox

The Tor browser 14.0 takes a lot of inspiration from Firefox. It incorporates a year’s worth of improvements, but also went through its annual ESR transition audit, where it addressed over 200 bugs from Firefox that may negatively affect the privacy and security of Tor Browser users.

Both browsers were recently hit by a vulnerability, so such collaborations are expected to avoid future exploitations. The announcement added that:

“In addition to the ESR, we overcame many other technical challenges that you can read more about in Morgan’s series of blog posts chronicling the team’s progress with Tor Browser Alpha, including: unifying Tor Browser for Android’s codebase into a monorepo, addressing reproducibility issues in our Android APK generation, reducing Android’s APK size for x86 and x86_64 platforms, and changes to how we spoof Tor Browser’s user agent, to name a few.”

Other notable changes inherited from Firefox are heavier headings and changes to line heights intended to improve font compatibility and accessibility.

This includes compatibility of fingerprinting protections without compromising their effectiveness, which allows users to enable features like picture-in-picture, screenshots, and more.

A big leap for Android

While the improvements cut across devices, Android got a major change that makes user experience better.

Before now, Android users couldn’t request a new circuit for a broken website without interacting with a persistent notification that appeared while Tor Browser was running.

With Tor 14.0, the project has integrated the desktop “New circuit for this site” feature to Android, allowing mobile users to request a new circuit seamlessly.