In January, we completely changed the Tails installation procedure.Tails is now downloaded as a *USB image*: an exact copy of the data as it is written to the USB stick.
This made the installation experience better for all operating systems and particularly easier and much faster for less tech-savvy users of Windows and macOS.
We created a [[boot menu animation|install/windows#animation]] to visualize how to start Tails on PC and clarified related troubleshooting instructions.
2019 was also a year of heavy maintenance work, as always. Keeping alive a tool like Tails consists mostly of many tasks that are not very exciting: publishing new releases every 6 weeks, updating Tails and our infrastructure to new versions of Debian and other software that we use, fixing small issues as they are reported to us, and implementing the many small improvements that make Tails easier to use.
Tails 4.0 was our most important release in years. Tails 4.0 adds KeePassXC, OnionShare 1.3.2, fixes Electrum, updates to Debian 10 and GNOME 3.30, starts faster and uses less memory.
We published more emergency releases than ever before: 5 emergency releases to fix 5 critical security vulnerabilities in Firefox and Tor Browser and always keep Tails as secure as possible.
We removed less popular software and localization packages, which you can now install yourself using the Additional Softwarefeature. Optimizations like these made the USB image of Tails 4.0 47 MB smaller than Tails 3.6, which was the bigger release ever.
Tails depends on a wider ecosystem of Free Software and privacy tools. We continuously contribute improvements to other projects which are either included in Tails or used on our infrastructure. Some of these projects, that we call "upstream", are:
