We already knew that the speed of page loads and downloads are big issues for our users, and our recent usability survey confirmed that. Our congestion control project will make a big improvement in user experience on the Tor network and we want you to benefit from it right away. We will continue to work on Arti so that Tor is on the right path for the future, and we will simultaneously continue to make improvements to the current Tor daemon code. My vision for 2022 is to keep Tor on this track, and our users are our priority when building this strategy. I’ve just named a few of the great things we accomplished in 2021. Tens of thousands of users answered our usability surveys, giving us great insight on how to improve our tools.

Our project to bring congestion control to the Tor network has made tremendous progress, and we’re close to seeing these features in Tor stable release, thanks to the work done on the Shadow simulator, which allows us to test and calibrate new features for the network. With a healthy team, we were able to ship very important projects like bringing Snowflake to Tor Browser stable discontinuing Tor launcher and replacing it with the connect page, and launching the Tor Forum, a tool to better support our community and users. This year, after layoffs in 2020, we were financially healthy and able to hire again, bringing amazing, skilled people to our teams. This is due to all the support we received, from each one of you who never gave up on the Tor Project, on our mission, and the power of Tor. The Tor Project is now financially stable and healthy after a couple of years of challenge.

And in 2021, we bounced back to continue to shape this greater future. 2020 was a year of sacrifice, but none of the stones thrown in our way stopped us from looking ahead and dreaming of a greater future. I’m very proud of every single person who contributed to Tor, the Tor Project staff, our core contributors, our community, and our supporters. Before talking about what I see for us in 2022, I want to reflect on 2021 and how this has been a year of resilience for Tor. It has become a tradition for me to write a blog post at the end of each year, sharing my vision for the Tor Project for the upcoming year.

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