Re: tor+torbutton without privoxy doesn't work

[Scott Squires <squires@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 06:39:04PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> Ah ha, there is a new Torbutton out this week, with new features and
> new bugs. Great. Here's a partial list from first playing with it:

Thanks for the bug report.  The fixes for the first three of these make
Torbutton 1.0.4, available at http://freehaven.net/~squires/torbutton.
See my comments concerning the last item.

> * I agree with you that un-clicking "use Privoxy" in the new Torbutton
> doesn't seem to work for me either. I'm using Firefox 1.0 in Debian Sarge.

Whoops.  Settings for not using privoxy are fixed.

> * When I click "Use custom proxy settings" and remove the "localhost"
> and "9050" from the http proxy, and click ok, it doesn't actually
> take effect. I need to close firefox and restart and then it does.

I think this was only affecting the https host and port settings.  It has
also been remedied.

> * In the "About Torbutton" dialog, it doesn't tell me what version
> I'm using. This makes it hard to report bugs well.

It should now display the same about box from the context menu as firefox
does when you view the about box from the extensions manager.  (the
firefox-generated about box looks nicer and contains the version number.)

> * I had to play around with it for a while, but it seems that it turns
> Tor off every time I change anything in the "Preferences..." menu. What
> I think that really means is that it's displaying the string "Tor
> Disabled" when the proxy configuration does not exactly match the one
> that we consider safe for Tor. This is great, but now that Torbutton
> has multiple configurations that it wants to consider safe, we need to
> update the logic for when to display "Tor Disabled".

That is how it was intended to work.  I would design it so that if the
Torbutton was on when you opened the preferences window then it would
remain on when you closed it, but this requires some magical javascript
communication between the browser window and the preference window which I
don't know how to accomplish.

I will not have any time to figure this out for some months.  If someone
would like to write a patch then they should call
torbutton.js:torbutton_check_status() from
preferences.js:torbutton_prefs_init() and record whether or not Torbutton
was enabled when the prefernces window opened.  Then in
preferences.js:torbutton_prefs_save() they should call
torbutton.js:torbutton_enable_tor() if Torbutton had been in an enabled
state when the preferences window was originally opened.  Knowing how to
do this would also allow me to do some other code cleanup involving the
preferences.

If someone wishes to do this, they can retrieve the darcs repository from
http://zargon.hobbesnet.org/~squires/repos/torbutton/.

--Scott