Mozilla makeover to boost Tor torque, capacity

Mozilla will tweak its flagship Firefox browser and host relays to speed up and boost the capacity of Tor under the Polaris project launched today. The browser baron joined the Tor Project and the Centre for Democracy and Technology, under the Polaris initiative, to create warmer, fuzzier relationships between the …

[PleebSmash]

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"The company was also developing an 'experiment' through it's nightly Firefox builds to establish a means to keep advertisers happy without invasive user tracking."

My guess is that it will end up replacing "private window", so the users that don't bother initiating a private session can still be tracked by advertisers. Since they are setting up relays, it seems they are all in and will make Tor part of the core functionality of Firefox. Let's hope they can get some Tor vulnerabilities patched up before it launches.

"First, Mozilla engineers are evaluating the Tor Project’s changes to Firefox, to determine if changes to our own platform codebase can enable Tor to work more quickly and easily."

Even before Tor lands in vanilla Firefox, the Tor Browser might get improvements.

[Pen-y-gors]

Hmmm, Tor.....

Isn't that the NSA Messenger app? [Judging my some recent revelations, if you want to send a message to the NSA, just use Tor!]

[h4rm0ny]

Good for them.

Firefox was the best browser there was for a while. Then it slipped and went downhill a bit, but more recently became slimmer and more responsive again. They seem to be getting back on top of things (and contrary to some, the sight of rounded tabs doesn't send me into a frenzy of rage).

All the main browsers are pretty good right now. Privacy is a pretty good way to distinguish themselves and set themselves above the rest. Microsoft do some privacy measures to distinguish themselves from Google, but they'll stop short of integrating TOR which would be a bit extreme and non-corporate for them. Google [b]can't[/b] take measures that would have a widespread gain on privacy because knowing everything about you is their business model. That leaves a gap for Firefox to set itself up as THE private browser.

Good for them. This is an important issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to draw attention to your online activities?

Visit the tor download page and click on install!

You might as well raise a flag over your location marked 'Monitor Me'.

[Ralara]

Well considering the BBC link to it and encourage people to use it...

[h4rm0ny]

>>"You might as well raise a flag over your location marked 'Monitor Me'."

Perhaps for now, but every single time someone does so, that flag gets a little bit smaller and the total number of flags increases by one. Five years ago, doing this was a big ugly wind-turbine sized flag, as you say. These days, it's more of a tree. And if Firefox go mainstream with this and it becomes the generic equivalent of "Private Mode", then it goes from tree to grass. To be honest, it looks like it's going that way anyway.

Now if we can just get the same effect with people using email encryption it's going to be that rare and marvellous thing: the people winning over the government. Communication all moving online was a windfall for the intelligence agencies. They'd never had things so good before. But that's a couple of decades and they managed before that. No solid reason this can't be a historical blip if we try.

[Fatman]

"RecogniSe"?? (I thought it was spelled "recogniZe"!!!

"We recogniSe that privacy is not just a functionality on your computer or a setting you can turn on or off, and we're excited to see what we can do to advance privacy online with Polaris."

"Recognise"???- my spell checker Red Flags that one.

[Notional Semidestructor]

Re: I thought it was spelled "recogniZe"!!!

You Sir, are clearly not of the English persuasion!

"recogniZe" being offered as correct implies that your spell-checker is set to the Revolting Colonial (or American) mode, and that it needs immediate correction to the English Language setting. ;)

Your pseudonym is suggestive of typical transatlantic dietary problems, so we'll forgive you, this once.

PS. Rather pleasing if the Tor function is indeed absorbed into Firefox. We have all sorts of chaps in our neighbourhood trying Tor, with friendly encouragement from this writer.

[T J]

Yeah whatever...

What's the chick's name in the photo? Come on....