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The Daily Dot has a story about a browser vendor who wants to package Tor as part of its private browsing mode. From the article:
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
The author elaborates:
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
The story appears to have gleaned most of its information from a tor-dev mailing list post. An interesting reply from Tor developer Mike Perry explains how Tor can be modified so that the network can handle the extra load.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday September 30 2014, @02:15PM
Interest in the Tor Browser Bundle has skyrocketed: 2.5 million daily users, 150 million downloads [bbc.com] of the Firefox + Tor bundle in the past year. The scaling proposal linked in the summary suggests 100 million Tor users is possible, albeit with some serious coding work for multicore, etc. Mozilla claims there are 450 million [wikipedia.org] Firefox users.
If the main build of Firefox ships with built-in Tor, it could be treated as a second toggle on top of private browsing mode. So one action to open a new private tab/window, and then another to switch to private Tor. That would reduce the number of clueless users while preventing them from suffering speed/other issues. Or Mozilla could go all in and make the private mode into Tor mode, a big move.
That comes out to less than $1/user when the other improvements are added (#5 is treated as if none of the other scaling ideas are implemented).
Mozilla has plenty of revenue from Google. They could afford to spend $10 million a year on improving Tor development and operating relays. And they wouldn't be alone in chucking cash at the project. It may boost market share of Firefox slightly, which in turn leads to more Google search cash. I think more people would hear about Tor as a default Firefox feature than as a separate browser bundle, which would lead to greater interest and Firefox use.
About Chrome's incognito mode [google.com]:
As you can see incognito mode is limited. It doesn't do much more than what a user could do before (clearing history, cache, cookies), but it segregates normal and private windows and makes it easy on the user. Firefox's current scheme [mozilla.org] is the same.
Do Not Track [wikipedia.org] is basically a failure [theregister.co.uk]. These modes can enable it, and that might stop some % of tracking. But Tor Browser Bundle comes with NoScript and HTTPS-Everywhere by default. If Mozilla implements Tor, it would likely include these extensions and maybe more. It could come with an expanded default whitelist for NoScript, and possibly other extensions like Privacy Badger. Put all of these features together and you have a browser that could at least try to achieve privacy. DNT+Tor+NoScript+HTTPS+Privacy Badger will probably confound advertisers and others (unless Tor security breaks for months at a time, as researchers have been hinting at).
Another thing that will reduce the potential user base for this feature: certain countries might try to block Firefox's automatic update servers after the feature is announced. Like Iran, where Firefox apparently has 46% market share. Organizations using Firefox ESR might postpone a Tor-by-default browser indefinitely.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]