We reported a couple of days ago that the Tor Project announced the release of the Firefox-based Tor Browser 5.5 anonymous web browser for all supported platforms, but they've also published details about the first Alpha build of the next major release.

Yes, Tor Browser 6.0 is now in development! It aims to be one of the biggest updates in the history of the project, and it also appears that the development team behind the Tor Project decided that it is time to finally drop the development of the 5.x branch, which had five maintenance builds until today. The hardened version of Tor Browser 6.0 Alpha 1 was also released.

"This release features important security updates to Firefox. On the usability front we improved the setup wizard UI flow. We also changed the search bar URL for the DuckDuckGo search engine to its onion URL. On the build system side, we switched the guest build VMs to Debian Wheezy for the Linux version (the previous versions were built using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)," developers explained.

Based on Mozilla Firefox 38.6.0 ESR

According to the release notes, Tor Browser 6.0 Alpha 1 is based on the ESR (Extended Support Release) of the Mozilla Firefox 38.6.0 web browser, the same version used on the stable branch, Tor Browser 5.5, and updates the Tor Launcher to version 0.2.9, the Torbutton to the 1.9.5 build, and the NoScript add-on to its latest 2.9.0.2 release.

Of course, the changelog, attached at the end of the article for reference, also provides us with technical details about what bugs have been fixed in this first Alpha build of Tor Browser 6.0. Therefore, we strongly recommend taking a look at it if you're curious to know what exactly has been changed.

In the meantime, if you want to help the Tor Project devs with their bug hunting session, you can download Tor Browser 6.0 Alpha 1 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via Softpedia and report bugs as you find them. Of course, be aware that this is a pre-release version.