Firefox to include Tor natively soon

The Tor network may soon be included in the private browsing mode Web browser. Firefox would be such a candidate.

Will Tor become massively popular? The decentralized network anonymization already enjoys a good reputation. Not just since the affair of Silk Road to the dark side, but also from Edward Snowden's revelations about the monitoring system of the NSA and others.

These revelations have highlighted the tools to protect privacy that can be Tor. A network that also allows users to bypass censorship of certain authoritarian countries. Another sign of the interest of Tor, the program XKeyscore monitors users who perform a simple visit to the project website.

The Daily Dot reports that several companies are currently engaged in discussions to integrate Tor in their products. In particular it is a question of integration into a private browsing mode. Director of Tor, Andrew Lewman mentions an unnamed product that affects 10-20% of Internet users worldwide.

For The Daily Dot, the description of Andrew Lewman points to Mozilla and native integration of Tor in Firefox browser. If any, it would give the private browsing mode in Firefox in real value. For now, it is content to prevent the registration of personal navigation data locally.

Currently, the Tor Project offers a browser - Tor Browser - which is based on a modified version of Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release, with a longer support for companies). An arrival in the private browsing mode in Firefox should not pose too many obstacles.

Where appropriate, it will however, that the Tor network has sufficient resources to deal with more traffic without causing too much slowdown. The discovery of Tor nodes will be improved, for example, while a challenge is to ensure that users do not have only a passive role in the network.

Mozilla and Tor Project share many common values. For now, Mozilla claims to have nothing to share about specific projects.