Tor Browser 8.5 (opens in new tab)

more people ought to use TOR so that the users who _need_ tor gets the protection of anonymity in a crowd.

If nobody uses TOR, then TOR users immediately becomes suspicious and nothing prevents the real world investigation from uncovering them.

I'm not. I prefer the Tor Project to make their decisions independently of Mozilla, which has a worse track record in most areas.

Additionally, tor isn't something that every Internet user should be using. I say this because when they get 10 ReCaptchas in a row, then try to log into their bank and have their credit card automatically frozen, then wonder why google search isn't working, then give up and just use Facebook all day anyway, they will definitely not be appreciating the 'anonymity' that we gave them.

The reason to have a Tor browser is that regular browser features aren't well suited to secure anonymous browsing.

The reason to have a regular browser is that you want those features, and the low latency of a direct connection.

It's interesting, the only way that would work is if they also turn every browser into a through node, which would be both highly controversial while also a great boon to the Tor network as a whole

I use Tor/Tor Browser quite often. I use it mostly for privacy, but also to test a few thing like price of plane tickets and such.

The speed is much better nowadays. Unless your unlucky and you circuit has a slow node in it (which the protocol try to avoid if i remember correctly), you should have a decent web browsing experience. Sure, it will be slower than your "normal" connection, but usually not by that much.

Although, if you plan on downloading large files via Tor, you will hit a bandwidth cap fairly quickly. You can look in detail here: https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html

Available bandwidth quadruple since 2014: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html?start=20...

I use Tor fairly regularly, though I am a bit annoyed that the default add-ons on the Tor Browser are so outdated (no uBlock Origin and questionably-set-up NoScript). And if you want to remain anonymous it'd be a bad idea to add new extensions since that changes your fingerprint. The main annoyance is not the bandwidth (it's okay for most things, videos can be a bit painful) but the CAPTCHA you have to keep completing. If I have to see one more photo of traffic lights where the boxes don't line up with the poles I'm going to scream.

Sure. I'm even a casual host of TOR hidden services. Every time I make a clear text website I'll also host a tor hidden service for it. Things like amateur radio sites. In a lot of ways once you get passed the controversy tor is more like the 1990s web than any evil underground. And at least on TOR you own your domain rather than lease it from some entity on a whim.

I use it (Tor, not the browser as much) just to bust NAT to my local computer when sharing stuff. It's so easy to create an onion service that links to a local web server.

I use Tor for about 30% of my browsing. Tor is handy if you are doing research on a topic and you don't want to leave too much of a 'data exhaust' or otherwise alert people to the fact that you are interested in certain topics.

I typically stay away from Tor when it comes to online banking or finance in general (logging into Amazon with Tor can raise some red flags for example).

In terms of speed, I have noticed personally that Tor has gotten a lot faster. Sometimes you get a slow circuit and have to spawn a new identity / rebuild a new circuit to get a faster one, sort of like 'circuit roulette'.

The rest of my surfing is for fairly innocuous subject matter and using Tor for it would be overkill. Again, Tor would be handy for privately researching general health issues, sexual health issues, mental health issues, etc

Tor is also handy for recon[0] in general too. For me privacy is how you present yourself to the world, and doing recon[0] in a certain community, or (anonymously) 'lurking' in a community is useful before you re-register an account and start posting as the 'real you'.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reconnaissance

What do you mean by casual? I use it relatively often, when I want to access a website privately (I don't trust any VPN service that much). I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person doing that.

But maybe you mean if someone using it as the main browsing tool for privacy reasons? This I doubt, since it's indeed slow. I also don't think that Tor is meant to be used as your main browser really.

As a sysadmin I use tor regularly as a easy and free third-party perspective. If there is a problem but it works when I test it, I then go and test in tor in order to eliminate any potential effect in my local network.

Tor is also ipv4 so it is a convenient way to get a ipv4 web view inside a ipv6 enabled network, without having to deal with browser plugins or adjust the interface on the machine.

I use orbot https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/ on my phone. I route most of my phone's traffic through Tor and it doesn't impact speed much, granted I mostly use my phone for messaging and not so much for browsing or working.

I use Tor in Android when lunching at Ikea Frankfurt as their free Wlan blocks some news sites such as presstv.com Via Tor I can read all world news while eating.

All the time for everything that is not very personal and sensitive. Youtube is more than fast enough.

Yes, I use it often. My Debian installations use Tor for installing updates. Just as an example.

Though it's important to note that using Tor directly rather than the browser bundle means that your browser fingerprint is even more distinct than it would otherwise be.

The one time I ever used the Tor Browser (at work, out of curiosity), my desk phone rang within 5 minutes: the in-house IT security team wanted to know what I was doing. So you're not kidding when you say it makes one's internet traffic more "interesting"!

> But use it explicitly, not as part of a browser bundle.

I hope you're conflating two issues here.

You surely aren't recommending users who "believe in Tor" install Tor directly and attempt to manually proxy their favorite browser traffic over it?

Not to say I disagree with your points against using TBB.

I think you underestimate how widespread ESR Firefox is.

Debian ships Mozilla's ESR releases by default. I'm sure many shops that prefer stability over latest features also deploy ESR. Judging by how often it gets updated it seems to me Mozilla is pretty diligent at backporting fixes.

My wholly-not-representative-for-the-wider-web statistics say approx. 22% of Firefox UAs are ESR release.

If you are worried about the security provided by the tor browser then you should be using projects like whonix and tails. Both of them try to block (or redirect it via tor?) all non-tor traffic, which should make it significantly more difficult to mount an attack.

Sadly, most of the replies you've gotten are terribly biased or uniformed. It is a good question. I'm not connected to any of this, so this answer is solely from my own understanding.

For those that don't know, the Brave browser has Tor tabs, which route through Tor. It also has the standard private tabs. Tor support currently exists only on the desktop Brave browser.

Here is the announcement: https://brave.com/tor-tabs-beta

Brave has been supporting Tor, and running Tor relays to improve the network.

Brave is newer at the game. They have had Tor tabs less than a year. They can do fingerprinting protection and no-script, but it's still a full featured web browser, with a lot of risks. The fingerprinting protection isn't as good as the Tor Browser, and unless they changed something, Javascript wasn't disabled by default in Tor tabs.

The Tor Browser has been around for a while and is meant to be a secure web browser from top to bottom. It has had a lot of development looking to find and fix possible leaks and to ensure security. That is its primary focus, and it is pretty good at it.

If you want to use Tor casually, maybe access an onion site, or just get a big boost in your level of privacy, the Tor tabs in Brave are a nice option. They are really easy to use and give great privacy. It is good for casual Tor use.

If you want (or need) serious privacy, the Tor Browser is a better choice. That is its purpose. It is developed to be hardened for protecting the user and it will provide better protection.

Tor Browser routes all data via the Tor network. Brave is a standard browser with built in ad-ware.

Just from considering that Brave is a complete meme, like c'mon switching ads to other ads is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You are not improving anything except padding pockets of Brave developers. To make matters worse it is just Chromium with new shit on top.

Literally anything is better than Brave, well, maybe not IE.

There are a bunch of privacy-improving patches in the Tor browser (such as protections against font fingerprinting, screen size fingerprinting, and so on). Brave doesn't have those.

(There's also the fact that Tor Browser routes everything over Tor, but apparently Brave can do this too now?)

Less than 3% of Tor traffic is to onion services of any kind (which means 97% is to websites already accessible on the public internet), and the most popular onion service on the internet by a large margin is Facebook's (facebookcorewwwi.onion). More than 2 million people use Tor every day -- are they all bad people? Heck, government agents use Tor when traveling abroad.

Do bad people do bad things using Tor? Yes. Do political dissidents in oppressive regimes use Tor? Yes.

However the vast majority of people are just ordinary citizens using Tor to access the internet -- the cross-section of Tor users is the same as the cross-section of ordinary internet users.

I wish people would at least learn the difference between "deep web" and "dark web". ;) I bet you use the "deep web" multiple times each week. The "dark web" on the other hand, probably not.

I do and a lot of people I know also do. Just for added privacy, or anything sensitive but legal.

Tor became such a pleasant (and fast, unlike it used to be) experience that it can be used for general anon surfing.

They do, not everybody enjoy democraty.

If using the definition for the dark/deep web that I think, then it includes traffic to and from any networked entity that does not have a URL (or otherwise public frontend).

This could then include stored data, VPNs or other company/govt/organisational data that is not accessible via normal web traffic.

I host all kinds of completely normal websites (ie, amateur radio) as tor hidden services. TOR is great because you actually own your domain instead of just leasing it on the whim of some corporation.

Once you get past the controversy TOR hidden services are more like the 1990s web than what you describe.

I've used it to maintain normal(ish) internet service for myself when visiting places like China.

Thank you for your service.