[tor-talk] recent firefox releases

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 09:48:55AM +0100, Gigi Bigio wrote:
> as far as I understand, recent Firefox releases do not support anymore
>Vidalia and its related possibility to browse anonymously. Though the
>"onion" button is still present on the top left corner, it will not work,
>as you know.

Vidalia was just a program to help you visualize what's going on with
Tor, and help you launch your Tor program. It didn't have anything to
do with Firefox.

But yes, you're right that long ago the Torbutton extension provided a way
to switch your Firefox between "using Tor" and "not using Tor". But that
turned out to be hard to keep safe:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/toggle-or-not-toggle-end-torbutton
and in retrospect it was probably a good decision:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-nsa-might-use-hotmail-or-yahoo-cookies-to-identify-tor-users/

> The alternative is to use Tor Browser. The problem is that you don't
>always want or need to browse anonymously every time you connect to
>internet and have then to wait for a few seconds (30+) your browser till
>it gets the line through its Tor.

Have you tried the recent Tor Browser releases? They start much faster
for me than the old ones.

> Of course Icould use and older version of Firefox, like release 4,
>for instance, but this is far to old for a satisfactory and safe browsing.

Agreed, this is not a wise choice.

> So what can I do? I can not have two different versions of Firefox
>(i.e. Tor Browser + Firefox 31) on my PC, because they interfere the
>one with the other, trying to share, for example, the same Extensions
>folder and so on.

This is exactly what many of us do. Tor Browser is designed to not
interfere with your other Firefox install. They shouldn't be interfering
in any way. If they are, either you're using it wrong (in which case
maybe there's a usability issue we can fix), or there's a bug that it
would be great to hear about.

--Roger