Tradeoffs on running Tor Browser and Orbot?

Clap2Grom673 It really depends, and you should know what you do/what you want to do with your browsing habits if you wanted me to really help you.

But basically to say the obvious, accessing .onion websites you should only ever use Tor browser, since it was actually made for that. Some sites are very hard to browse/access considering how the tor network works, or even totally unusable if you're using the Tor Browser, some sites where the security is increased if you're trying to login later on the same account you might get locked out in the same session , in 10min time frame just because of its very dynamic IP rotation, and you might even sometimes get a banished IP that makes you unable to access a site unless you request a new "route" for that specific site, making you change IP

matchboxbananasynergy If you're using Orbot (or the Tor network in general) as a glorified VPN just to hide your IP, then using it for apps or other browsers is fine.

Using Orbot (but not Tor Browser) has any advantage or disadvantage compared with other VPNs like Mullvad or Proton?
Thanks

kopolee11

Firefox should run every tab as an isolated process. But sandboxing is not as needed as you may think.

It is needed to prevent malicious code exploiting the rendering engines from accesing even more. But in some cased those exploits could also circumvent the Sandbox.

I had a Discussion about this recently and to my surprise was told Mozilla rewrote many core components of Firefox in memory safe Rust. This automatically gets rid of many security problems, while Chromium afaik uses unsafe languages.

To this "another attack surface", yes maybe but you already have Chromium, which due to its usage is a way bigger one. Firefox circumventing hardening is bad though.

Also, Vanadium executes all Javascript. The torbrowser and firefox in general can use Noscript, which increases Privacy and Security insanely.

You need to change defaults and block every new Javascript, then whitelist every single origin you trust. The web is unusable without Noscript.

To Orbot etc, you can use it, but a paid good VPN may be better. After all Tor is way more anonymous than any VPN, but makes you a target more. With regular apps and Orbot you would constantly use Exit Nodes (I run one, do the same!)

The tor network is only good if connecting is private (public wifi, vpn) and you stay inside.

Also checkout i2p, there is a purplei2p fdroid repo that has a Conversations fork for i2p!!

missing-root

missing-root The tor network is only good if connecting is private (public wifi, vpn) and you stay inside.

Why do you say this and what do you mean by stay inside? Seems like this is only a concern if you live somewhere where Tor is illegal or will cause excess attention from law enforcement (which some argue that any use of Tor will give you "extra" attention, but I digress). In that context then yes I guess one could say it's "only good with" because using Tor in itself would get you arrested, but that's not the case everywhere. If you're not concerned of your isp knowing that you're connecting to Tor then I don't really see it being a problem, unless you really need to conceal your IP address because there is a high liklihood of being targeted.

Damn edit fails

Tor runs by default in client mode & opens a socks proxy on port 9050.
Configure $software to use tor: socks4 or socks5 proxy localhost:9050 or 127.0.0.1:9050

TorBrowser has tor built in and binds default to 127.0.0.1:9150