Releases

Tails 4.26 was released on January 11.

Among other changes, it added a shortcut to open the Tor Connection assistant when starting Tor Browser if Tails is not connected to the Tor network yet.

Usability improvements

Installation pages

We fixed all the low-hanging fruits among the issues identified in December during usability tests of first-time use:

• #18764: "Start in macOS" is confusing when obvious
• #18765: QR code in steps is unclear
• #18771: Add screenshot of Plymouth to installation steps
• #18773: Update time estimates in overview

After which we started a bigger project to restructure our installation pages. Stay tuned!

Connecting to Tor

Polishing the user experience of connecting to Tor from Tails is one of our top priorities for 2021-2023. We are continuously designing and implementing improvements in this area. Here's the January 2021 edition :)

We noticed a while ago, thanks to usability tests, that users not accustomed to the GNOME desktop have difficulties connecting to Wi-Fi. So we made this more discoverable last year, by making Wi-Fi settings reachable from Tor Connection. Unfortunately, while our initial implementation looked OK in a simplified test environment, it turns out it was not working in real user scenarios, so we fixed it (#18587).

Metrics

Tails has been started more than 773 496 times this month. This makes 24 951 boots a day on average.