Better Tor-gether? Mozillla bids to bring anonymous browsing to the masses
The Mozilla Foundation isn’t stupid. It knows that many people are worried about their online privacy and really aren’t keen on being tracked or spied upon by advertisers and spy agencies. And so to cater to this group of paranoid Web users, the maker of the popular Firefox browser has just launched a new initiative called Polaris, in partnership with the Messiah of Internet privacy – the Tor Project.
Two projects have been devized under the initiative. The first one sees Mozilla and the Tor Project working alongside the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) to create “privacy technology, open standards, and future product collaborations,” according to Tor’s Andrew Lewman. Mozilla’s engineers are working to see how they can make Tor better and faster, which is significant because the Tor browser uses much of Firefox’s code.
Mozilla didn’t reveal what improvements it’s working on to make things “better”, but it did say how it plans to speed things up. This will involve Mozilla hosting its own high-capacity Tor relays to boost the network’s current, limited capacity.
“Mozilla engineers are evaluating the Tor Project’s changes to Firefox, to determine if changes to our own platform code base can enable Tor to work more quickly and easily,” said Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer in a blog post.
As for the second project, this sounds even more exciting and could potentially lead to a significant rise in Tor usage. Mozilla says it’s working on an “experiment” with its nightly builds to develop a way to keep advertisers happy without having to track people all over the web.
“[It looks at] how we can offer a feature that protects those users that want to be free from invasive tracking without penalising advertisers and content sites that respect a user’s preferences,” Dixon-Thayer said.
She added that the experiment was far from finished, and would be refined over the coming months as they received feedback from users.
It’s not clear exactly what this “experiment” entails, but it does sound an awful lot like the rumored Tor button for Firefox. If this feature is indeed implemented into the main Firefox browser, given its popularity, it’s likely there would be an explosion in the number of people using Tor, not too mention more explosions of rage from senior US law enforcement officials :-)
What with Facebook having recently launched a special URL optimized for people using Tor, it’s about to become a whole lot easier to remain anonymous when we’re browsing the web.
