Tor Browser 16.0 ships with Firefox ESR 153, Linux ARM64 support, redesigned Settings

Tor Browser 16.0 is now available for Desktop and Android, marking the project's first stable release based on Firefox ESR 153. The Tor Project completed its annual ESR transition audit, reviewing and addressing over 270 Bugzilla issues that could affect user privacy or security. Desktop users receive a complete Settings redesign that retires the legacy General page, rebuilds Tor-specific Connection and Security Level pages with Firefox's modern components, and hides or warns on settings that could enable fingerprinting. A new opt-in generic window titles feature prevents third-party applications from reading page titles through the window manager, though the team notes potential accessibility trade-offs and has upstreamed the capability to Firefox via the Tor Uplift Project.

The release also introduces native Linux AArch64 support for devices such as Raspberry Pi and Apple Silicon Macs running Linux, while ending support for 32-bit x86 Linux due to minimal remaining usage. Android builds transition significant UI components to Jetpack Compose and Material Design 3. The bundled user manual has been replaced with content from the project's 2025 Support portal, maintaining offline availability for troubleshooting connectivity issues.

What changes in Tor Browser 16.0

• ESR 153 migration and audit: The release incorporates a full year of upstream Firefox changes and required review of 270+ Bugzilla issues to identify modifications that could degrade Tor Browser's privacy or security guarantees.
• Settings architecture overhaul: The General settings page has been eliminated and its contents redistributed to dedicated Appearance, Downloads, Tabs and browsing, and Accessibility and Languages pages; Tor-specific Connection and Security Level pages were rebuilt using Firefox's modern component framework for visual consistency.
• Privacy-hardening settings policy: Settings that could compromise anonymity or increase fingerprinting surface have been either concealed from default view or annotated with explicit warnings, with existing user preferences preserved across the migration.
• Generic window titles (opt-in): A new setting under Privacy and security replaces all window titles with "Tor Browser" to block OS-level and third-party application snooping on browsing history; the feature has been upstreamed to Firefox as privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow and privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow.pbm in about:config.
• Linux architecture changes: Native 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support is now stable after a year of alpha testing, while 32-bit x86 Linux builds are discontinued due to declining usage from approximately 4,000 daily update checks in 2019 to roughly 200 currently.

Why it matters

The AArch64 stabilization directly benefits Linux on ARM ecosystems including Raspberry Pi and Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon, expanding privacy-preserving browsing options without requiring alpha-quality software. The upstreaming of generic window titles through the Tor Uplift Project continues the long-standing pattern of Tor Project privacy engineering flowing back to mainstream Firefox, improving protections for the broader browser user base. For distributions and privacy-focused Linux users, the Settings redesign and fingerprinting-resistant defaults reduce configuration errors that could deanonymize users, though the accessibility trade-offs of generic titles will require community feedback to resolve.