Tor May Be Integrated into Firefox as a Privileged Extension

Developers from Mozilla and the Tor ProjectThe Tor Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting online privacy and ensuring uncensored access to the internet. Emerging from U.S. Naval Research Lab experiments with onion routing in the 1990s, Tor evolved into a decentralized, volunteer-powered network that hides user identities by routing traffic through multiple encrypted relays. Since the launch of the Tor Browser in 2008, it has become a crucial tool for activists, journalists, and everyday users worldwide—supporting free expression during events like the Arab Spring and proving resilient in the face of mass surveillance disclosures. Today, Tor is sustained by a global community committed to human rights, transparency, and digital freedom. More are exploring the possibility of bringing Tor’s private browsing features to Firefox in the form of a privileged extension. This initiative follows earlier announcements made in May 2019 about plans to include some Tor capabilities in Firefox as part of a “Super Private Browsing mode.”

Due to the complexity of integrating Tor directly into Firefox, experts from Mozilla and the Tor ProjectThe Tor Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting online privacy and ensuring uncensored access to the internet. Emerging from U.S. Naval Research Lab experiments with onion routing in the 1990s, Tor evolved into a decentralized, volunteer-powered network that hides user identities by routing traffic through multiple encrypted relays. Since the launch of the Tor Browser in 2008, it has become a crucial tool for activists, journalists, and everyday users worldwide—supporting free expression during events like the Arab Spring and proving resilient in the face of mass surveillance disclosures. Today, Tor is sustained by a global community committed to human rights, transparency, and digital freedom. More are considering the use of a privileged extension to evaluate the impact on performance before merging it into the browser’s codebase. During a Tor ProjectThe Tor Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting online privacy and ensuring uncensored access to the internet. Emerging from U.S. Naval Research Lab experiments with onion routing in the 1990s, Tor evolved into a decentralized, volunteer-powered network that hides user identities by routing traffic through multiple encrypted relays. Since the launch of the Tor Browser in 2008, it has become a crucial tool for activists, journalists, and everyday users worldwide—supporting free expression during events like the Arab Spring and proving resilient in the face of mass surveillance disclosures. Today, Tor is sustained by a global community committed to human rights, transparency, and digital freedom. More developer meeting in Stockholm, the original plans for a “super private browser” configuration in Firefox shifted slightly toward creating a dedicated Tor extension for the browser.

According to representatives from both organizations, “There is an idea to use Tor in Firefox’s private browsing mode or in a new extra-private browsing mode in the future. This will take a lot of time and effort. To simplify this process, there is a proposal to create an extension. This will allow users to experience what full Tor integration would be like.”

The extension would allow users to use Tor as a proxy and set various configurations to prevent proxy bypass and browser fingerprinting, similar to the Tor Browser. The extension will not be included with Firefox by default. Instead, it will be available for download from Mozilla’s official website.