Tor Browser 16.0 Is Here

Tor Browser 16.0 is available for desktop and Android, the Tor Project announced on October 29. It is the first stable release built on Firefox ESR 153, which brings a year of upstream Firefox changes - and the team says it completed its annual ESR transition audit, reviewing and addressing over 270 Bugzilla issues covering Firefox changes that could negatively affect the privacy and security of Tor Browser users. Tor Browser is free and open source.

What's new on desktop

The Settings experience gets a complete redesign, following a parallel redesign shipped in Firefox in June: a cleaner layout, updated navigation, and clearer labels. The long-standing General page is retired, its contents distributed across new pages, and Tor-specific pages like Connection and Security Level have been rebuilt to match. Some settings that could compromise privacy or make your browser easier to fingerprint are now hidden or carry clear warnings; existing preferences are preserved.

Two more additions stand out. An opt-in generic window titles option (under Privacy and security) replaces every window title with "Tor Browser," so other applications on your computer can't read the title of the page you're viewing - a feature the team has also upstreamed to Firefox. And the built-in manual has been replaced with the current help content from the new Support site, still bundled for offline reading. After a year of testing, this release also adds native support for 64-bit ARM Linux, such as Raspberry Pi and Apple Silicon Macs running Linux, while ending support for 32-bit x86 Linux, which the project says now accounts for around 200 update checks a day.

Android and what's next

On Android, large parts of the interface move to Material Design 3 as the project applies Mozilla's Jetpack Compose modernization, with more to come in future releases. Under the hood, the release updates tor to 0.4.9.15 and NoScript to 13.6.37.1984. Next up, the team is working on an improved circuit display - coming to Tor Browser Alpha first - that can visualize multi-path circuits and will mark the feature's debut on Android.