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Tor Executive Director Hints At Firefox Integration
blottsie writes: Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a "private browsing mode" in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off. "They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base," Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. "Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users." The product that best fits Lewman's description, by our estimation, is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
People use "private browsing" mode mainly for porn (when Firefox first launched the feature, it was nicknamed "porn mode"). The most popular porn sites require Javascript. Tor is ineffective if Javascript is enabled. This doesn't look like a good match.
I do not want Tor "integrated" in Firefox. Nor should ANYONE. This is why they make addons and extensions. I am getting tired of them adding more and more to Firefox. The whole POINT of Firefox was to be lean and fast and shed all the "integrated" extras of previous browsers. We don't need it to continue bloating up, taking more space, getting more complicated, and using more resources.
1) Stop adding stuff that can be in an addon instead.
2) Stop trying to turn Firefox into Chrome.
3) Stop removing user settings to allow users to control what they want (like placement of tabs and such).
4) Remove firebug/debugger, whatever you call it and put it in an addon where it belongs.
Many government agencies and businesses have Firefox installed as a primary or as a secondary browser available for use (in addition to IE of course).
They also have policies against the use of proxies, p2p, etc.
If TOR is included within Firefox and they don't give administrators a way to keep people from using it on the job you can bet they will jettison Firefox as an option for their users.