about:tor may fetch the "you're using Tor" page from browser cache

[konotrea]

Using tor-browser-linux64-3.5_en-US.tar.xz

While doing some tests and having disabled the Tor Launcher browser addon (so the Tor gateway doesn't actually get started with the browser) I noticed:

about:tor

still says

"you're using Tor"

even if the Tor gateway isn't running at all for whatever reason.

If it's possible that about:tor gets fetched from browser cache, this page doesn't prove anything

[arma]

I think you might be looking at this the wrong way. about:tor is a local page. It's not a question of whether it came from the browser cache.

I'm guessing you want that page to behave differently in some way once you've modified your TBB in a nonstandard way?

I'm inclined to treat this as a "you broke it and now you're reporting that it's broken" bug.

[konotrea]

Let's compare:

1) The previous browser welcome page was saying: You are using Tor, your exit IP will be 11.22.33.44.
I assume this page gets generated from the exit node.
So the user could see: it works, and I won't be using my ISP's IP.

2) The current welcome page (about:tor) is static, probably generated from the browser plugin. It looks as comforting as before but it might not tell the user if their traffic should - for any reason - _not_ be routed via Tor. (Either the tor browser plug could fail or some mechanism on the local machine could transparently redirect the traffic somewhere else)

On the new welcome page there is a link to the old one (1). But i wonder why didn't we keep the old welcome page as the browser home page? Is there an advantage of about:tor?

[mcs]

Replying to konotrea:

But i wonder why didn't we keep the old welcome page as the browser home page? Is there an advantage of about:tor?

The about:tor page loads a lot faster and does not make people wait before they can start browsing. At startup, code is run which connects to the tor control port and checks to make sure the tor SOCKS port matches the proxy setting in the browser. The check is skipped if the browser preference extensions.torbutton.saved.transparentTor = true or if the Torbutton add-on does not have a tor control port... and if you disable Tor Launcher, it probably won't. The control port is picked up from the extensions.torlauncher.control_port hidden preference or from the TOR_CONTROL_PORT environment variable.

[mcs]

In my tests using Tor Browser 6.0.5 with Tor Launcher is disabled, the about:tor page correctly reports that there is a problem. Also, there is nothing that prevents users from changing their home page to ​https://check.torproject.org/ if they prefer to have an end-to-end check. Therefore, I am closing this ticket. Please reopen it if you can provide steps to reproduce the problem reported in the original ticket description.