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Tor Browser Gets a Redesign, Switches To New Firefox Quantum Engine (zdnet.com)
The Tor Browser has rolled out a new interface with the release of v8. From a report: The Tor Browser has always been based on the Firefox codebase, but it lagged behind a few releases. Mozilla rolled out a major overhaul of the Firefox codebase in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57, the first release in the Firefox Quantum series. Firefox Quantum came with a new page rendering engine, a new add-ons API, and a new user interface called the Photon UI. Because these were major, code-breaking changes, it took the smaller Tor team some time to integrate all of them into the Tor Browser codebase and make sure everything worked as intended. The new Tor Browser 8, released yesterday, is now in sync with the most recent version of Firefox, the Quantum release, and also supports all of its features. This means the Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon UI 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.
You're going to sit forever anyway, waiting for the traffic to pass through multiple Tor nodes. It's not like a new page renderer is going to solve that.
First impression is I like it. Video playback seems sluggish but overall positive. Hopefully any NSA addons did not make the cut.
Not when you have the assets already cached. Most people donâ(TM)t just visit a site once. I was playing with it this morning. Itâ(TM)s a decent speed improvement even within the restraints of tor
More impressively msmash posted an actual tech article not a biasedpolitical article for a change. Losing too many readers now I suspect
You miss the point entirely although yes the new engine is faster.
It's not like a new page renderer is going to solve that.
The point is to be synced up to the current Firefox codebase. Which by the way is awesome. I have all my favorite extensions running, in spite of all the FUD about the new Webextensions API.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
XUL-based extensions were insecure as hell and have no business being in a browser associated with Tor.
And this time around, we're not going to have a handful of Slashdotters proclaiming that they're going to drop the broswer forever because their 20-year-old RSS reader add-on won't work anymore and something something Looks Like A Clone of Chrome.
(says the FBI)
ps: Tor Traffic on the Internet is visible as obvious Tor Traffic. No, the encrypted data can't necessarily be seen but the fact that you using Tor is. Simply by using Tor, you might get put on a "watch list".
I really wonder that. I support tor. I've never actually used it because I don't have much to hide, but I understand that other do. So I ran a tor relay (not exit) as my way of supporting the project for a while; from my home adsl. After a while I noticed some weird stuff going on. Some websites (important ones) wouldn't load properly. Emails sent would bounce or simply never reach their destination. After looking at the problem I found that my IP was on some minor blacklists. I stopped the relay and after 2 days I was off the blacklists. Hence my question, if running a simple relay gets you blacklisted, what does running an exit point does to your other internet usage from that IP ? Who can afford separate IPs besides institutions ? So who is really really running them ? Certainly not private citizens...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
It's not like a new page renderer is going to solve that.
The point is to be synced up to the current Firefox codebase. Which by the way is awesome. I have all my favorite extensions running, in spite of all the FUD about the new Webextensions API.
Why would anybody mod that comment troll?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Do any of you nerds have an opinion on the Tor tab feature that's built into the Brave Browser?
Because your last line. It isn't FUD. Some extensions stopped working. Just because all yours work doesn't mean they all do.
It is FUD. Firefox's extension ecology is as vibrant as ever, but far more secure. And if somebody disagrees, they should do so instead of taking the belly slither route.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Do not install it. Do not even google it. The use of TOR is immediately detected and recorded and will put you on a watch list. Your life will undergo dramatic and unpleasant changes. Do not risk your well-being. It's not worth it.
"but it lagged behind a few releases" is wrong.
it's based on esr, an entirely valid release channel from mozilla for firefox. so, no it does not 'lag behind'. it's right on track... and they're really on the ball considering the current one that just came out was the jump for esr channel from 52 to 60, as per the published release schedule.
I did install a XUL extension a couple weeks ago. It's just a toolbar icon that replicates the View/Page Style menu. Of course it got disabled but it was nice to have while it lasted. Why have this? Pressing Alt and navigating to the menu and submenu is tiring. It's for reading pages without using CSS, so you can read some pages that are unreadable with javascript disabled or even bypass a few paywalls.
You can use the built-in Reader View for a lot of pages, but it's not available for all pages. It depends on the page structure.
Or maybe they took away the API to do what the extension did and it can't work.
Have you tried Tor in the last few years? It's much better than it used to be. Yes, there'll always be *some* added latency, but a couple seconds isn't "waiting forever".
It's probably worse if you enable JavaScript, but that's because the web in general is worse if you enable JavaScript.
Get your ass to Mars, Elon.
Moreover this gets rid of the horrible and old memory management of Firefox 52. I was at risk of horrible hard drive grinding, long lived and rarely recoverable, though that might be the 32bit version (default on Windows) breaking down at high RAM usage and some kind of vast mitigating operations were triggered. Why the swap? try Windows 10 on 4GB RAM. Figure out how long reads/writes on many hundreds megabytes of memory paged out to disk take, on a HDD around 2MB/s because of the random accesses. It often got irrecoverable so you either wait for the firefox.exes to crash or you kill it with task manager (within which switching a tab takes 5 seconds or more)
Even though the number of firefox processes has tripled on my machine with the new tor browser, the memory use hasn't exploded, it seems smaller. Biggest process is ~700MB. That's 32-bit safe at least (64bit machine with 64bit OS, I'd rather have the tor browser bundle stay 32bit anyway until the RAM gets upgraded)
tl;dr : as expected or better, this move to Firefox 60 made the browser faster and more stable. It means I don't need to upgrade a low end 3Ghz 2017 laptop anymore.
Same deal as "normal", non-tor Firefox Quantum : this one was an improvement such that it removes the need for upgrading 10-year-old computers.
I'll check its availability more, though I doubt it's available much on "misbehaving" pages. Some of them are entirely white when you go visit them, then you activate "Page Style/No Style" and *everything* is available, up from nothing. That is awesome.
On occasion I did read a news story by reading the page source..
Another site sometimes embed video. Kudos for using their own "CDN" and some HTML5 embedding of an .mp4 file but still doesn't work without javascript, or that easily. I can get to the .mp4 file directly from page source, and if playback sucks there's right-click and "save as". Wow, feels like 2004 again except back then the link to the video was directly on the site so downloading it was more trivial.
It is FUD. Firefox's extension ecology is as vibrant as ever, but far more secure. And if somebody disagrees, they should do so instead of taking the belly slither route.
I can't imagine anyone other than a Google employee modding that down. Sad to say, I can easily imagine a Google employee modding that down. How far they have fallen.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.