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

[Nathan of Guardian]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015, at 01:06 PM, Amogh Pradeep wrote:
> 
> > 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 strongly disagree that we need to make major UI changes, because once
we do that, it becomes a much bigger problem to maintain and update
Orfox.

The problem you are trying to deal with is one that happens rarely for
the typical Orbot user. Most people keep Orbot running all of the time
in the background on their phone. This is how a typical VPN is used as
well. They don't selectively start and stop it, and if they did, that
would create a pretty poor user experience based on the time it takes to
boostrap into the Tor network.

> > 
> > 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.

This sounds like a good small change that we could manage.


-- 
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info