Thus spake adrelanos (adrelanos@riseup.net):
Mike Perry:
Our plan over the next few months is to create a super-simplified Tor Controller as a Firefox extension for TBB that can configure proxies/bridges/pluggable transports (but nothing else), launch Tor, and display a bootstrap progress bar *inside* the browser window while it waits for Tor to download network data.
If they can not easily configure to be a bridge or relay, won't that results in fewer Tor servers? Isn't Vidalia encouraging users to contribute to the network?
It is quite debatable as to if Tor nodes on residential Internet connections actually help the network. For some time, we planned on developing a way to detect if your connection was fast enough and stable enough to ask you to be a relay[1], but it's never been implemented.
If this feature is ever implemented in Tor, the Javascript controller can periodically ask Tor if it has detected this and suggest that you download the Advanced Controller package to help out.
But even without this notification, I suspect if your Internet connection is fast enough (and your browser stays open long enough) to help the Tor network, you're going to know it already, and you'll have no problem downloading an Advanced Controller package.
[1]. https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/175-automatic...