How to Use Tor Browser Without TOR

By Jasper MonroeLinux Commands

Using Tor Browser Without TOR

Tor Browser is an excellent browser with a well-designed and configured version of Firefox. It features minimal telemetry, leaves few traces of your online activity, and comes with a solid set of plugins (like NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere) that help you blend in with the crowd. So far, I haven’t found anything better among the wide variety of browsers out there. I also don’t really want to keep reconfiguring Firefox every time a new version comes out and something changes or breaks. That’s why I came up with the idea to use Tor Browser as my main browser, but without TOR itself.

Why Use Tor Browser Without TOR?

This is about conditional anonymization. In everyday life, routing all your traffic through TOR is inconvenient because it’s slow, and exit nodes are often blacklisted, which means you’ll frequently have to solve CAPTCHAs. That can be annoying and frustrating. So, using Tor Browser without TOR, but with a VPN, is a pretty good compromise.

How to Launch Tor Browser Without TOR

You need to start Tor Browser with the environment variables TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH and TOR_TRANSPROXY set to 1. This tells the browser not to launch or use TOR.

Instructions by Platform

  • Linux: 
    cd tor-browser_en-US/Browser
TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1 TOR_TRANSPROXY=1 ./firefox
  • macOS: 
    cd "/Applications/Tor Browser.app/Contents/MacOS"
TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1 TOR_TRANSPROXY=1 ./firefox
  • Windows 10: 
    cd tor-browser_en-US\Browser
set TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1
set TOR_TRANSPROXY=1
firefox.exe

Next, in the address bar, type about:config and change the value of network.dns.disabled to False.

That’s it—Tor Browser should now work without TOR. You can check by visiting https://check.torproject.org.

Source

Onion Market — a free P2P exchange on Telegram. We have XMR, BTC, and USDT.TRC20.

Leave a Reply