Vidalia

» see vidalia-project.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2006 Tor was a daemon. You installed it and edited a config file by hand, and if it was working you had no particular way of knowing except that everything got slower. Vidalia put a window around that. It was a Qt control panel that started and stopped the daemon, and it drew a live graph of your bandwidth so there was finally something to look at.

Matt Edman and Justin Hipple wrote it. The Tor Project had run a competition for a usable interface, which is the sort of thing a project does once it notices its software is only reachable by people who already know how to reach it. Vidalia came out of that, first released on 28 February 2006, and it ran wherever Qt ran.

The turn came on 20 October 2011, when the Tor Project announced that the plain Vidalia bundles would be discontinued by the end of that year. The reasoning in the post is unusually blunt for a security project: "we made the call that more people were at risk due to misconfiguration exploits than 0day in the actual code." A control panel that let you set up a relay also let you set up a relay wrong.

Version 0.2.21 landed on 3 December 2012 and was the last. A year and sixteen days later, on 19 December 2013, Mike Perry announced Tor Browser Bundle 3.5. Vidalia had been replaced by Tor Launcher, a controller built into Firefox itself, and the 2.x series was deprecated the same day.

Turkey's long run of blocked sites was only getting going when the onion disappeared. YouTube had been unreachable from here for most of the stretch between 2008 and 2010, and the March 2014 Twitter block was still three months out when 3.5 shipped. By the time Tor turned into something people here actually installed, that window had already been taken out of it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The panel was a short list of buttons, and those buttons covered most of what Tor could be asked to do. One stopped the daemon. One opened a world map with your current circuit drawn across it. The one everybody remembers said Use a New Identity, which tore down the circuit and built another, and it is the single feature every later Tor interface has kept.

Underneath that sat the message log, where the daemon's complaints arrived in plain text, and a settings pane that exposed enough of the config file to be dangerous in the wrong hands. Running a relay was three clicks. That was the point of it in 2006, when the network was small and needed volunteers more than it needed a tidy interface, and it is also what made the project nervous by 2011.

~ the handover ~

Tor Launcher won on the merits. Folding the controller into the browser cut startup from a wait into a moment, and it removed an entire second application that could be out of date or left running after the browser closed. Users noticed other things first, mostly that New Identity now restarted the whole browser and closed their tabs.

Vidalia itself was never formally buried. It simply stopped being maintained, and the Tor Project moved from not recommending it to telling people plainly not to run it, since an unpatched control panel talking to a live daemon is a worse place to be than no control panel at all. A backup copy of the source still sits on GitHub, kept by someone who worried Tor would delete it. vidalia-project.net stopped resolving a long time ago.

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