The Patch that converts a Firefox to a Tor Browser

Have you ever wondered was makes the Tor Browser the Tor Browser? That is, what patch you would have to apply to Firefox in order to end up with a Tor Browser.

The answer is not really easy to get. I expected to do something like git clone tor-browser ; git diff firefox-upstream or so. But for an odd reason, the Tor Browser people do not import the pristine Firefox version to their repository. As a side note, the build instructions are a bit arcane. I was hoping for such an important tool to be built easily. But it requires root access and a wild container technology. Weird. In fact, this is preventing me from flatpaking the Tor Browser right now. But I’m working on it.

Long story story, to get the diff, do something like:

wget releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/60.2.1esr/source/firefox-60.2.1esr.source.tar.xz
git clone  https://git.torproject.org/tor-browser.git
cd tor-browser
git checkout --orphan firefox
tar --extract --strip-components=1 --file ../firefox-60.2.1esr.source.tar.xz 
git add .
git commit -m 'firefox upstream import'

git diff firefox...tor-browser-60.2.1esr-8.5-1-build1

Of course, you need to adjust the Firefox and the Tor Browser version in the future. I have imported the upstream firefox code into this repository so that you can make diffs as you like. Unfortunately, the Github Web interface does not show diffs of unrelated branches.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.