For years, the Tor Browser has been the best choice of web browsers for anyone concerned with online privacy and protection from corporate and government spies. It works with the Tor network which accepts your browser’s requests for Web content, connects to the server(s) on which the objects reside, then downloads, copies, and transmits them to your browser. The browser never connects directly to the server. Instead, the request sent to the server(s) and the information that is sent back is relayed through a number of Tor network servers and each link is encrypted separately from every other other link. Tor is free software for enabling anonymous communication.
See Wikipedia’s article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) for more information on how the Tor network works.
The core principle of Tor, “onion routing”, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. The source code has been released as Free and Open Software (FOSS). Anyone may legally download, install, and use the Tor networking software and/or the Tor Browser.
Tor and the Tor Browser provide privacy for political activists in many countries as well as for activists, journalists, authors, and others whom a repressive government might want to track down or merely associate with certain “forbidden” content on the Web. Besides government spying, the Tor Browser is used by banking customers, online shoppers, stock market investors, and others to block corporate spies and any hackers. Of course, privacy is a two-edged sword. Tor is also used by gun runners, drug dealers, copyright violators, and others. Such is the price of freedom.
Tor Browser recently rolled out a new interface with the release of version 8. The new design is easier on the eyes and the menus are arranged in a much more logical manner than previously. The Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon user interface that current Firefox versions use. It supports the same speed-optimized page rendering engine and has also dropped support for the old XUL-based add-ons system for the new WebExtensions API system used by Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and the rest of the Chromium browsers. The initial setup of the previous versions of the Tor Browser contained lots of technical terms, often confusing the less technical users. Again, the setup has been simplified and most of the technical buzzwords do not appear in the setup screens although are still available in other menus for the techies who want to see what is going on “under the hood.”
For more information, or to download and install the free Tor Browser, go to https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en.
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Categories: Online Privacy & Security
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