Tor developers announced the termination of Tor Messenger support

The TOR developers team announced the termination of the support of the Tor Messenger messenger, which was released in 2015. The message about this was published on the Tor team blog .

According to Securitylab , the reasons for this solution were problems with the development, metadata leak and a lack of resources for the development of the project. In particular, after the Messenger’s exit, Mozilla stopped working with the Instantbird client, which underlies Tor Messenger, it integrated Instantbird’s functions into the Thunderbird mail client, but the Tor team did not have resources to continue the development or create a new client.

In addition, Tor developers could not solve the architecture problem, because of which Tor servers can still register metadata about the correspondence of Tor Messenger users.

"Even after all the releases, the Tor Messenger is still in the beta testing stage, and we never conducted an external audit (there were two internal audits conducted by the TOR developers). We also ignored user requests about new functions and error reports due to limited resources. Given these circumstances, we decided that it was better to stop supporting the under-designed product," - The developers say.

Tor representatives brought an apology to users and invited everyone to ask questions about the current situation in the comments on the recording. At the same time, they noted that they still believe in the potential for using Tor as a platform for messaging, but at present do not have resources to embody this potential.