Tor Browser

Tor Browser is a free, open-source browser that routes your web traffic through the Tor network, a volunteer-run overlay of thousands of relays, so that no single point can link what you visit to who you are. It is developed by the Tor Project, a nonprofit, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with an official Android app alongside. There is no official iOS version; iPhone users are pointed to the independently developed Onion Browser.

The browser itself is a hardened Mozilla Firefox from the long-term support branch, preconfigured so that anonymity is the default rather than a setting you can forget. Every connection bounces through three relays, each one knowing only the previous and next hop. Trackers and cookies are isolated per site and wiped on exit, and every Tor Browser user is made to look as identical as possible, which makes fingerprinting far harder than in an ordinary browser. Two built-in tools matter day to day: New Identity resets the whole session in one click, and the circuit display shows exactly which relays carry the current site's traffic.

Tor Browser is also the standard gateway to .onion services, sites that live entirely inside the Tor network and never expose a server location. The security level slider lets you trade convenience for safety, disabling JavaScript and other risky features on untrusted sites at the strictest level. For users on networks that try to block Tor itself, bridges and pluggable transports are built into the connection screen, no extra downloads required. No logs, no account, no telemetry feeding an ad company: the project is funded by grants and donations, and the code is open, the browser under the MPL-2.0 license and the Tor daemon under the BSD-3-Clause license.

The honest trade-off is speed. Three relays carrying real traffic cost latency, so pages load slower than over a direct connection, and video streaming in particular can suffer. Some sites treat Tor exit relays with suspicion and serve repeated CAPTCHAs or block logins outright. Tor is not a magic cloak either: it protects traffic in transit, but signing into your personal accounts still identifies you to those services, and the browser's own documentation is refreshingly clear about what it cannot hide.

For journalism, activism, research, or simply keeping your internet provider and ad networks out of your business, Tor Browser remains the reference tool, and the one the privacy community audits hardest.