Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2018Rome/Notes/FusionProject

by jerheinze • 8 years ago

757 239 8 years ago

trac.torproject.org

fredley• 8 years ago

Why does the Tor Browser Bundle ship with HTTPS Everywhere? Surely if you're connected through a Tor circuit, HTTPS provides no extra security?

StavrosK2• 8 years ago

This is the biggest misconception about Tor. Tor provides anonymity, but any node (EDIT: any exit node) can read what you're sending if it's not encrypted. You need both.

detaro3• 8 years ago

nitpick: exit node. The ones on the way can't, neither can any if you access hidden services.

crankylinuxuser3• 8 years ago

That's definitely not true if your endpoint you're talking to is an *.onion . A connection to an Onion is encrypted to the destination. That also means if you were running, say NodeRed with authentication, sending credentials "over the clear" (no SSL cert, because stupidity) it's not actually sent over the clear. It's encrypted to the public key relating to your onion address.

Now, if you're using Public Internet->Tor->Public Internet, then absolutely yes the last node CAN read the contents of your packets. In that case, you absolutely need appropriate encryption to hide the contents (sigh, not the metadata) of your packets.

akerro2• 8 years ago

You -> Tor node -> Tor node -> Tor Exit node -> http/https clearnet -> NSA/GCQH/BND/you name it -> destination server

shp0ngle• 8 years ago

If you connect to a clearnet website, the clearnet website is fetched by the exit node. If it's not HTTPS, the exit node can change the website however it wants.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#CanExitNodesEave...

Yes, the guy running the exit node can read the bytes that come in and out there. Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it makes sure to encrypt everything inside the Tor network, but it does not magically encrypt all traffic throughout the Internet.

This is why you should always use end-to-end encryption such as SSL for sensitive Internet connections.

```

Fortunately HTTPS adoption is much better now :)

akerro2• 8 years ago

Fortunately HTTPS adoption is much better now :)

It's HSTS what we need in 2018

stordoff• 8 years ago

If you're connecting to a clearnet site, you probably need HTTPS _more_ than on a standard connection - you _explicitly_ have a node between you and the site that you don't necessarily trust (see, e.g., https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-to...).

HugoDaniel• 8 years ago

anonymity /= confidentiality

you can stay anonymous while making sure anyone can read what you are sending.

you can send confidential messages while making sure anyone knows who you are.

you can also combine the two :)

oconnor663• 8 years ago

you can stay anonymous while making sure anyone can read what you are sending.

That depends a lot on what you're sending. Tor stops people from identifying you based on your IP address, but you can still identify yourself by logging in on http://not-encrypted.com.

Lennie3• 8 years ago

Please read and play with the graphics on this page, it explains it all:

https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

sp3324• 8 years ago

The page isn't loading for me. https://web.archive.org/web/20180601141754/https://trac.torp...

(https://archive.org/donate)

maerF0x03• 8 years ago

it worked after a few tries for me. I believe its just serverload, keep trying or try later

sp3324• 8 years ago

I'm sure it is just overloaded. But there's no point kicking it when it's down. Use a mirror for now.

ogennadi• 8 years ago

Ultimate eventual goal: Make Tor Browser obsolete, so Tor Project can focus on research instead of maintaining a fork of Firefox.

maerF0x03• 8 years ago

Hopefully other browsers are encouraged to do something similar also, else Mozilla will effectively control the destiny of Tor

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

Brave is already working on Tor private tabs though it won't have the same fingerprinting/first-party isolation guarantees as with a Tor Browser, https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/labels/feature/tor Should be shipping soon https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/984231250104733696

sametmax8• 8 years ago

Good, now if only we could have bitorrent baked in...

EDIT: I mean baked in in the browser like tor, not baked in tor. Although interesting, it's really not my priority.

kleiba• 8 years ago

Honest question: is bittorrent even still a thing?

jean-4• 8 years ago

Firefox recently whitelisted a bunch of p2p protocols so that they can be used by browser extensions. One of them is the Dat protocol [0], which is similar to BitTorrent but has better support for mutable data and random access [1]. It's far from being "baked in", but it's a step in the right direction.

[0] https://docs.datproject.org/

[1] https://docs.datproject.org/faq#dat-vs

zdkl• 8 years ago

Hey Sametmax, big fan of your site.

Apart from the existing ecosystem of content, are their any reasons you want BitTorrent over ipfs?

Everyone on tor AND ipfs... Now that would be something.

ungzd• 8 years ago

Opera had built-in Bittorrent (this feature is now removed, probably after Opera became rebranded version of Chromium).

tempodox• 8 years ago

Nope, I wouldn't want to have to keep the browser open all the time just because I'm downloading a torrent.

ComodoHacker3• 8 years ago

Ultimatest super-goal: make anonymity the default stance and socially accepted norm. Do with anonymous browsing what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption. Force big data suckers to invent new business models for exploiting our data without breaching our privacy.

chipperyman573• 8 years ago

I can't read this article because I'm at work, but unless they managed to solve the problem of Tor being very, very, very slow, this will never happen. End users will definitely notice a difference and likely won't care about their privacy. They'll just see Firefox being way slower than Chrome and switch.

petra• 8 years ago

They need to solve the issue of speed, altough maybe for sensitive queries(assuming that's enough, a very big assumption,), people may be willing to use a slow "super private browsing mode". another option is to make people pay for faster speeds ?

And if i recall correctly, a "global passive attacker" listening to internet traffic around can de-anonimize TOR using ML. Seems like something that would be possible and profitable for a Google and internet infra companies.

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption

Convince everyone that using a closed source, proprietary app is good security?

Spooky233• 8 years ago

Likely actual result: Firefox will become increasingly irrelevant.

If Tor is going to be a built-in feature of Firefox, most employers are going to flag it as malware. This is a ridiculously dumb thing on so many levels -- promote privacy by directing your network traffic to "volunteer" proxy services?

JohnTHaller2• 8 years ago

Is it a fork? I thought it was a heavily customized version of Firefox ESR with specific settings and defaults using the channels OEM configs. Looking at the binaries, it's definitely not the standard build anymore.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

It's a fork based on Firefox ESR, see for the details: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

crunchatized4• 8 years ago

OEM configs have never been enough to implement everything they need in Tor Browser. They eventually started their uplift effort [1], to upstream all the patches and features they've added to it, so that they can possibly just use OEM configs.

Project Fusion is a superset of that effort.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift

kibwen3• 8 years ago

Ultimate goal of the Tor project, that is. Lots of people in this comment thread seem to have not clicked the link and are presuming that this is a Firefox roadmap. The Mozilla analogue of this page only mentions bringing Tor features into Firefox, without stating a goal of obviating the Tor Browser entirely.

crunchatized4• 8 years ago

Well, Mozilla engineers wouldn't be the ones in charge of, or benefiting from, shutting down the Tor Browser fork, would they? So why would they need to include that kind of (incredibly distant, virtually pie in the sky) goal on their wiki page?

mtgx2• 8 years ago

I've been waiting for this for years. Good job convincing Mozilla to do this! Good idea to standardize the spec, too.

I hope they give a good name to this new super-private mode (which actually isn't too bad of a name, either).

I also hope they don't just implement a "more private" mode in Firefox, but also a more hardened mode for Tor. The Tor mode in Firefox should use the strictest possible sandboxing technologies available to them from the operating system (file system virtualization, etc).

I'm even talking about those new fancy hypervisor-based micro-VMs in Windows 10, which I believe they are called Krypton containers, and it's what Edge uses within the Application Guard context. Although if the users have to enable Hyper-V/Micro-VMs first in Windows, then maybe this hardening mechanism should be optional, but encouraged. Otherwise, it should probably be the default.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-containers-will-transform-...

Oh, and this hardened mode should use a different process for every tab/extension, too, by default, just like Chrome does. I still don't think Mozilla's "hybrid" approach makes it as secure as Chrome (which is why it's a hybrid/compromise for lower memory usage).

kodablah5• 8 years ago

Cool, now let me start an ephemeral v3 onion service from JS and have it reachable via WebRTC by a peer who has their own. It's the perfect tech marriage, removes signalling servers and NAT busters, but may be a bit taxing on directory servers and too slow to use for media streams (but I'll take data channels only).

SlowRobotAhead• 8 years ago

I know some of those words. (I'm an embedded programmer)

Hello716• 8 years ago

sounds really useful, but to be fair, it doesn't really remove either. you're effectively just using the Tor network as freely available (but slow) signalling and TURN servers.

kodablah5• 8 years ago

Exactly. Doesn't require any server side work and you get built in anonymity across peers and for discovery.

floatboth• 8 years ago

Hah, kinda reminds me of Opera Unite. (That one wasn't from JS, it offered some fixed applications like file hosting, notes, etc., but it was hosting stuff from the browser)

gsnedders4• 8 years ago

Unite allowed server-side JavaScript (though I forget how many privileged APIs there were), but I don't think you could support custom protocols.

forapurpose• 8 years ago

What will Mozilla do about the Tor network's usability problems? Advanced users can workaround them and because they understand the benefits and engineering, accept the frustrations as a cost for a worthwhile (and free) technology. But what will non-technical users do?

Many public Internet websites filter connections from the Tor network, many other websites are very slow, yet others impose extra obstacles such as multiple rounds of captchas (even 5 or more) or degraded service (including high suspicion of payments), and of course you often will receive webpages in the wrong locale or language - which can trigger regional filters. Currently, workarounds requires resetting the circuit (few non-technical users will even understand what the circuit is), lots of patience and reloads, and often just giving up. [EDIT: And non-technical users won't understand what is happening and therefore won't know when to use which workaround.]

If that's the experience of typical Firefox users, they won't use it and they will have bad associations with Tor and Firefox.

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

Why would Mozilla do anything about that? It's not like this is going to be enabled by default in Firefox.

Hello716• 8 years ago

FTFA: Whether there will be two private browsing modes is to be determined.

Hello716• 8 years ago

Which sites in 2018 still present multiple CAPTCHAs to users with cookies and JavaScript enabled?

I think the theory behind this project is that those problems are primarily caused by Tor's popular image as a 'fringe network for pedophiles and drug dealers' and that by making it more mainstream they can fix those issues.

(please more replies saying "that sounds really hard" and less replies saying "tor is not a fringe network for pedophiles and drug dealers", thanks)

paulie_a2• 8 years ago

Google. Which uses a really shitty custom captcha for their services.

darpa_escapee• 8 years ago

Cloudflare.

blauditore• 8 years ago

I thought this will be disabled by default, no? If so, casual users would never get in touch with it in the first place.

kibwen3• 8 years ago

There are many things in the Tor Browser that benefit privacy that are separate from the use of the Tor network, and it's these things that Firefox is most likely to adopt.

superkuh• 8 years ago

They aren't Tor network usability problems. They're clear web network usability problems. It'd be great if more people used Tor, NoScript (yes, I know this will not be baked in), and other privacy protecting mechanisms so that clear web sites would care about the users they're intentionally making the experience worse for.

freehunter• 8 years ago

A huge number of people use adblockers, and websites haven't changed to make the experience better. All they've done is changed to block anyone using adblockers, which is what many sites/networks already do to Tor.

cpeterso2• 8 years ago

Mozilla used to run some Tor exit nodes. I don't know if that is still the case.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2877592/mozilla-puts-old-har... (2015)

urda• 8 years ago

Mozilla keeps driving for the users on the internet. I know many of my own frustrations came from the fork that is Tor. This work is great to see.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

I know many of my own frustrations came from the fork that is Tor.

What are your frustrations with the Tor Browser?

tgragnato• 8 years ago

There is a gap between the safer and safest security level: sometimes I want to display icons and symbols but don't want js to run.

Installing additional extensions is discouraged; but in my experience Decentraleyes makes latency somewhat less disturbing, CAPTCHAs appear less often; and uBlock Origin is essential [-].

[-] shipping with every available filter list enabled and cached may be a good enough default

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

If I understand it correctly, you shouldn't be using any website accounts using Tor browser that you also use outside of it. I really wonder if/how they can make the user properly aware of that in a kind-of super private browsing mode.

kodablah5• 8 years ago

"Multi-Account Containers"

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this comment, but if you mean that their approach would be similar to MAC, in the sense that "super private browsing" would have to be enabled in about:config or through an extension: that would make sense.

Hello716• 8 years ago

you can, and it is still a valuable contribution to the Tor network, since it adds cover traffic. the catch is just that the website you're using will know who you are. I hope that the vast majority of users will understand that if they log in, there is no privacy mode that will save them from the site they log into.

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

Right, I guess that's good if you want to contribute to the Tor ecosystem, but if you want to browse anonymously, that's no good. Unfortunately, even as a somewhat tech savvy (though in hindsight obviously naive) person, the repercussions of logging in somewhere in Tor Browser weren't immediately clear to me.

devit2• 8 years ago

I think Mozilla should look at using Servo instead of Gecko in this mode along with a new JavaScript interpreter written in Rust, at least optionally, since perfect security is essential when using a Tor browser without a dedicated VM.

kibwen3• 8 years ago

Servo components are being uplifted into Gecko gradually. There's less benefit to rewriting the JIT in Rust because static type systems can only do so much when the whole goal of a program is to generate code dynamically.

devit2• 8 years ago

My suggestion was to have Firefox support both Gecko (with uplifted component) and a pure Rust renderer, with the latter to be used in the Tor mode where security (to preserve anonymity against resourceful adversaries) matters over compatibility.

For security, instead of a JIT, a simple JavaScript bytecode interpreter written in Rust to be used exclusively in the Tor mode would be ideal, for maximum security at the cost of worse performance.

Another option is a JIT that generates code that is easily proven to be safe (e.g. because it does a bounds check on all memory accesses and only does indirect jumps using a jump table, or because it's the only thing running in a process and jumps are still constrained with a read only jump table and read only code).

Yoric2• 8 years ago

Well, there is the ability to write something along the lines of https://github.com/nbp/holyjit :)

tomrittervg4• 8 years ago

Hi all. I am a Tor Project Developer and work at Mozilla on this project. We appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and feedback. Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode. There's no guarantee this will happen, but I hope it will and we will keep working towards it.

If anyone is interested in assisting development-wise, Firefox bugs tagged 'fingerprinting' in the whiteboard are a good place to start. You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate (https://blog.torproject.org/get-help-running-your-relay-our-...). More people being involved in spec work (especially at the W3C) and focusing on fingerprinting and privacy concerns is also very useful - it's very hard to keep eyes on all the things happening everywhere.

We also appreciate users of Firefox Beta and Nightly (Nightly especially). The flags Tor features are developed behind (privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.firstparty.isolate) are experimental. I appreciate bug reports from users running these flags but you should expect them to break things on the web (resistFingerprinting especially; first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms).

eganist• 8 years ago

Thanks for your effort! If I can ask, how much overlap exists between your team and the team overseeing the implementation of security protocols within Firefox e.g. HSTS, CSP, etc.? It'd be neat to see Firefox drive innovation here alongside the effort to weave Tor into the browser; although I wouldn't necessarily treat Tor integration the same as I might the implementation of other security specifications, I can see how the teams working on such might overlap, hence my question.

tomrittervg4• 8 years ago

The Fusion project is done by a subset of that team (+me, I happen to sit with Sandboxing due to other responsibilities).

xoa• 8 years ago

You can also run Tor relays and help us improve the health of the network by working with Tor's new Relay Advocate

Since I've seen this come up before in many previous discussions of Tor I think it's worth emphasizing/clarifying up front: Tor relays are not the same as Tor exit nodes. Relays do not talk to the public internet, they serve only the full encrypted internal Tor virtual network. So they won't ever send out traffic from an IP under your control to some website or general Internet system (and in turn tie that IP in any way to spam/abuse/whatever, at least not for that reason). It's not necessarily hidden that it is acting as a relay, but the relay itself will have no knowledge of the traffic it's carrying.

Plenty of people have reasonable concerns about the risks/inconveniences that might come with acting as an exit node, but on both a legal and practical level there are many more jurisdictions where merely relaying encrypted traffic between other relays isn't a problem. And it's still quite helpful, both for network speed and because purely internal Tor Hidden Services do not need any exit nodes at all.

pricechild• 8 years ago

That said, plenty of providers use the list of tor relays (which is also public) to block traffic.

Sites such as https://www.dan.me.uk/dnsbl then help people do this.

That site in particular may "warn":

This DNS blacklist contains ALL tor nodes (entry, transit and exit nodes) - think carefully before choosing to use this list for blocking purposes.

but anyone who doesn't understand tor simply won't understand the decision and choose ALL.

Running a relay on your own address isn't sensible because of this. Nevermind an exit node.

icelancer• 8 years ago

And plenty of people insist that Tor relays are totally safe to run. They are not. I NEVER ran an exit node from my home IP, only relays, and my IP was still blacklisted from various sites due to this behavior.

I still contribute to Tor via VPS rentals and such, but relays are not no-risk alternatives to exit nodes. Period.

ChrisSD• 8 years ago

first party isolate is generally more stable and usually only has breakage on particular login forms

Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)?

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

Are you referring to third-party login services and comment systems (such as disqus and similar)?

See the full list of bugs of breakage when privacy.firstparty.isolate is enabled: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/FirstPartyIsolation#First_...

azernik• 8 years ago

Our ultimate goal is a long way away because of the amount of work to do and the necessity to match the safety of Tor Browser in Firefox when providing a Tor mode.

If that doesn't pan out, do you expect the ongoing work on this project to reduce the size of the patches that the Tor Browser project needs to carry on top of the Firefox trunk?

cpeterso2• 8 years ago

Yes. This Mozilla wiki page has more information about (what Mozilla calls) the "Tor Uplift":

The intention of Tor Uplift project is to land all Tor Browser patches so that Tor can directly use Firefox main trunk instead of a fork.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift

walrus012• 8 years ago

Seconding the other posters who mentioned that tor relays and Tor exit nodes are two very different things.

"Why you need balls of steel to run a Tor exit node":

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-Septemb...

Given the low level of technical knowledge with a great deal of US law enforcement, increasing militarization, no knock warrants, etc... Please think twice before running an exit node from your house. Do it in Colo somewhere with a small, plucky ISP owned by a first and fourth amendment absolutist.

_bxg1• 8 years ago

This would be amazing. The main reason I've never used Tor is the fear that it would make me look like I had something to hide (instead of just a general desire for privacy). If it were built into Firefox, I'd probably switch over from Chrome.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

The main reason I've never used Tor is the fear that it would make me look like I had something to hide (instead of just a general desire for privacy).

1. You can hide the fact that you're using Tor by using pluggable transports which are already built-in the Tor Browser (such as meek-azure, obfs4, snowflake, ...).

2. That's the biggest reason as to why one must use Tor as much as possible even if they don't care about privacy. More people using Tor = the less interesting it is to be a Tor user.

lucb1e2• 8 years ago

it would make me look like I had something to hide

That's exactly why I use it on a regular basis!

Perhaps when looking up political or medical things (also for friends), it could be good to run that through Tor. That is not something to hide per se, but it is definitely not something that is anyone else's business, and you don't want to be bubbled.

openfuture• 8 years ago

Okay but what about maidsafe, dat, ipfs etc. The correct solution is to have firefox expose a 'protocol api' or something along those lines so that any 'alternate internet' project can create a backend extension to make firefox compatible with that protocol.

jean-4• 8 years ago

Seems like some people are working precisely on that.

See for instance:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo... (CTRL-F Decentralization)

https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

mtgx2• 8 years ago

That's amazing to see. Thanks for sharing.

This is exactly the kind of tech Mozilla should be supporting - tech that gives users more freedom on the internet.

neokantian• 8 years ago

"Removing fingerprintability" amounts to the browser just NOT sending all the http request headers that it sends by default. How hard can it be to "comment out" these lines?

zaphar• 8 years ago

I don't think this is true. Especially in the case of things like canvas fingerprinting.

bzbarsky• 8 years ago

I just checked and there are over 100 checks for "should I have different behavior here if I am resisting fingerprinting?" just in the C++ code in Firefox today. There are some more in the JS code but they're harder to search for.

Some simple examples:

* Various navigator APIs (oscpu, platform, etc) need to be disabled.

* Gamepad API needs to be disabled.

* Have to prevent reading canvas pixel data

* Have to block information about avaiable OpenGL extensions from WebGL

* Modifier keys on keyboard events need to be spoofed (because they can be used to guess at keyboard layout)

* Errors from the media stack (for <video> and <audio>) need to be blanked out.

* Something to do with voice synthesis APIs; I didn't look into details.

* Connection API needs to be neutered

* Various timing APIs hanging off "performance" need to be neutered.

* Presentation API needs to be neutered.

* Number of CPUs reported by the navigator API needs to be spoofed.

* Window sizing for window.open needs to be spoofed.

* Ability to measure the difference between the window.inner* and window.outer* APIs needs to be disabled.

* Mouse positions in mouse events need to be spoofed to make it look like the window is fullscreened.

* Touch event positions need to be spoofed.

* Geolocation needs to be disabled.

And so on, and so forth.

gsnedders4• 8 years ago

Need to do something about fonts and the CSSOM (Element.getBoundingClientRect() for example), too.

Just shipping a standard bundled set of fonts and only allowing use of that doesn't suffice because anti-aliasing width differences could give away the used font renderer.

Endy2• 8 years ago

So we lose another valuable project of the Web. I wonder why I feel so lost - that when I was young, the Internet was barely born... and now I'm watching it die.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

What's going to be lost?

Endy2• 8 years ago

Tor Browser. A single privacy-dedicated browser package; even if it is now being built on Chromefox.

trumped2• 8 years ago

I agree and I don't really like how the internet is evolving either but this sounds like one of the good changes, unless I'm missing something

MayeulC• 8 years ago

Great news !

With wider adoption of ipv6 and all the good things that come with it (don't mistake me, they are great!) also comes the risk that each computer will get a uniquely identifiable IP address that will be used for fingerprinting. I've never really used Tor in the past, but this got me thinking about it.

An option could be to provide a webRTC-based node, but I am not sure how feasible that would be, after reading some comments here. Maybe for entry nodes and guard nodes instead of exit nodes? The transient nature of browser sessions could greatly enhance privacy. Of course, you would need some algorithms to deal with this very nature... But I can imagine some.

This surely lowers the barrier to entry for greatly enhanced privacy. Quite a lot of people seem to be aware of the private browsing mode, and I can imagine this being turned into a simple toggle on the private browsing home page, along with a short explanation (and a link to additional privacy tips).

A low hanging fruit that could enhance the privacy a bit would be to use the trusted recursive resolver (DNS over https) in private browsing by default, since it already is part of Firefox. It just needs a default trusted resolver.

tomrittervg4• 8 years ago

An option could be to provide a webRTC-based node, but I am not sure how feasible that would be, after reading some comments here.

I'll point you at FlashProxy (https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/) and Snowflake (https://github.com/keroserene/snowflake) the latter of which is in active development. =)

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

bunkydoo• 8 years ago

I believe Tor browser is already just a version of Firefox if I'm not mistaken. What would be the advantage of integrating with Firefox as opposed to say, a VPN integrated into the browser via a plugin. Just seems a little redundant and Tor is beginning to seem dated also with new solutions popping up and making the pitfalls of Tor more apparent.

ubershmekel• 8 years ago

I imagine the idea is to have an incognito mode that actually is incognito, and free.

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

I think an important part is to lessen the maintenance burden for the Tor project: if the code is in Firefox proper, Firefox developers will encounter it when working on other features and make sure they work together, whereas currently the Tor project needs to rebase their modifications onto "regular" Firefox.

ec109685• 8 years ago

The vpn owner knows all traffic flowing through it.

ccnafr• 8 years ago

Wasn't this launched in 2014? I see the wiki hasn't been updated since January. Is this a new push to get this done?

fwdpropaganda• 8 years ago

How many more "super private browsing mode" Firefox users will there be? Potentially hundreds of millions of daily users.

Tor has hundreds of millions of daily users?

vntok2• 8 years ago

Of course not.

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html

xur17• 8 years ago

Does anyone know what caused the big spike in users at the end of last year?

Buge• 8 years ago

That quote doesn't say currently hundreds of millions of daily tor users. That quote says that in the future, when firefox includes tor by default, there might become hundreds of millions of daily tor users.

mortdeus• 8 years ago

I am starting to feel firefox in a serious way. But im just sooo concerned that their software still sucks. I mean, we ARE talking about a company who thought it was smart to spend time trying to build a javascript OS for mobile.

So let me ask again. When are you guys going to start building firefox from the ground up and make the perfect browser we all deserve?

And if you disagree, please. Present your arguments. I am the person you need to sell right now.

firefoxd• 8 years ago

Building the perfect browser from the ground up?

Do you remember netscape?

Sylos• 8 years ago

They've started on it, it's called Servo.

But webstandards are evolving faster than modern browsers are, so building a browser from the ground up would require quite a bit more money, and worse know-how - you can't just buy that in unlimited amounts, than they have for Firefox right now, and they can't exactly stop developing Firefox in the meantime either.

Also, their three big competitors have most of their browser market share thanks to building an operating system underneath it. No matter how slim Mozilla's chances at success were, it would've been foolish to not try to get into the operating system market. And they built it based on web technologies, because that's where they have know-how.

wpdev_63• 8 years ago

Have you considered also implementing I2P[0] in parallel with tor? It suppose to be harder to analyze traffic at nodes with I2p though it isn't as battletested as tor.

[0] https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor

jerheinze29• 8 years ago

I2P is more concerned with inward traffic rather than clearnet 'exit' traffic which is the main thing that Mozilla wants in a super private mode.

Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox

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