“Our primary goal is to un-fork the Tor Browser”

There are lots of great web browsers now, which is a huge improvement on the state of the world when Firefox 1.0 was released.

All major browsers today do share a huge problem - the web browser needs to be fast (performance and responsiveness are a Really Big Deal to people), and it also needs to be secure (people getting ransomware via the browser is Not OK with them). Privacy is a more nebulous topic, I agree.

One place where Mozilla has invested that can make a real difference there is with Rust and Servo.

A lot of the investments in Firefox that Mozilla makes are intended to help the web as a whole. Trying to standardize and expand on cross-browser extensions with WebExtensions is an example of this.

Coming back to the topic, while I agree that most people don't care about privacy online but there are some who do and Tor users almost certainly do. Bringing Tor's security and privacy improvements to Firefox is good for everyone, and some improvements help both performance/responsiveness and security (the recently-released and ongoing work from Mozilla on multiprocess and sandboxing is an example of this.)

This is not about integrating Tor into Firefox, rather it is about incorporating switches into Firefox for the security/privacy improvements that have been made in Tor Browser.

You can think of Tor Browser as a better Firefox that just happens to include built-in support for the Tor network. Tor Browser is security-hardened and makes numerous changes to improve privacy, such as reducing fingerprinting opportunities and attempting to isolate browser state by URL bar domain. The Design and Implementation of the Tor Browser doc [1] is an excellent read on the approach taken.

Since it is trivial to configure Tor Browser to run on the "normal internet" (not on the Tor network), there may not be much reason to run Firefox instead of Tor Browser. There is one possible reason: not all security fixes may be backported to Firefox Extended Support Releases (ESR). According to the ESR FAQ [2], only "high-risk/high-impact security vulnerabilities" will be backported to ESRs. So clearly some security vulnerabilties that are not considered by Mozilla to be high-risk/high-impact may be left unfixed in ESRs. Additionally, it seems likely that not all bugs that are security vulnerabilities will be correctly identified as such. Many exploitable bugs that can lead to code execution are often published as only stability or denial of service bugs by project maintainers - so-called "Denial of Reality" vulnerabilities [3]. I think this is what Daniel Veditz is alluding to when he says "Mozilla leadership has already decided to help Tor move toward being able to build off a Release Firefox rather than an ESR--it's safer for our users."

So in that sense, it is great news that Mozilla is working to make it easier for Tor Browser to be based on top of Release Firefox instead of an ESR. Even if all Tor Browser patches make it in to Firefox, I imagine it will be a good deal of work to get out-of-the-box Firefox to behave like Tor Browser. And given that every six weeks, Firefox may have new features that present new attack surface, or enables new fingerprinting opportunities, it still seems like a safer bet to have Tor Browser devs vet each release, rather than constantly try to stay on top of what switches need to be flipped.

Personally I will continue to trust Tor Project to ship a browser that is configured for strong security and privacy out-of-the-box.

[1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/191080/

I haven't tried it recently (as in the past month), but I like to fire up the browser, press Ctrl+L, type an address and press Enter in a few seconds. That seems to take forever on Firefox compared to Chrome.

This will never happen. There's too much utilitarian purpose in scamming the elderly and ignorant into thinking their web browsing is private when they hit private browsing mode.

The cabal of backdoored-by-default hardware will never lose its complete monopoly on normal users. Especially not after a few more years of logging every human-internet and human-computer interaction.

Discussing firefox, or anything else, on this website is a petty distraction compared to the real and substantive danger most of humanity and all of 'humanity' faces.

I agree with this. "Tor Browser Mode" should become the default "Private browsing mode" on Firefox. It seems to me that a lot of uneducated users seem to have the idea that Incognito/Private mode does, somehow, give them more anonymity in a way other than locally.

The extra streaming traffic would probably cripple Tor exit nodes in the short run if Mozilla didn't run worldwide fast exits on their own, but it'd be a start in a good direction, IMO.

I'm sure someone will come along and tell me that "this isn't what Tor is useful for," but as far as I am concerned Tor has a PR problem. If everyone uses Tor as part of Firefox Private Browsing, a lot, lot more normal people become Tor users, not "extremists" or "dissidents" or "criminals", the headless horsemen of the anonymity apocalypse.