[guardian-dev] how to do clean tor integration in Orfox

[Amogh Pradeep]

> On Sep 17, 2015, at 6:52 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at guardianproject.info <mailto:hans at guardianproject.info>> wrote:
> 
> 
> Orfox was working pretty well in general as a browser.  Amogh added NetCipher
> to get the automatic Tor starting.  That started Orbot fine, but Orfox errored
> out on any websites that it tried to load while waiting for Orbot to start
> Tor.  So I implemented an approach that makes the orbot starting stuff
> transparent, and tries to make Orfox transparently hold loading any pages
> until Tor is ready.  This used the internal Fennec event "Tab:Load".  The
> problem with that approach is that the Fennec UI blocks and waits for the
> Gecko engine to respond to any "Tab:Load" messages that have been sent.
I agree that we need to make major UI changes to integrate the two applications properly.
I’d be able to implement it if someone gave me a clear idea on what exactly to do, UI wise.
> 
> I also tried queuing incoming Intents that cause a web page to be loaded, but
> that only works for new URLs coming in.  If Orfox is not running, then it is
> started and wants to load a few tabs from the previous session, those will all
> show the failure to connect page since they are not being started by Intents,
> but rather the internal Tab:Load messages.
> 
> I also thought about just going back to the old Orbot start Intent that
> launched Orbot itself, but upon thinking about that, I think it would really
> handle error conditions badly, like when Orbot fails to start properly,
> because going to Orfox would always just redirect to Orbot.
> 
> Now, I'm thinking the best approach includes two key pieces:
> 
> * remove the Tab:Load queuing that is there now, and switch back to the Intent
> queuing method I had going before.
> 
> * update the "proxy connection failed" page so that it shows the Tor status
> (OFF/STARTING/ON/STOPPING)  That page will also include the "Try Again" button
> that is there.  Also, when STATUS_ON is received from Orbot, that page can
> automatically try again.  We should probably also add a button that brings up
> the Orbot main screen so that users can easily troubleshoot the Tor connection
> in Orbot.
I think this would be awesome. If we could redirect to a help page in case the proxy connection isn’t fine (Orbot isn’t fine) and we help the user troubleshoot on that page, it would be a nice UX.
> 
> .hc
> 
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amoghbl1

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