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Comment by 3gg | Hacker News Reader

The TOR browser is based on Firefox, so this also affects them, right? A chrome-based TOR browser would be the biggest joke in the history of online rights. I have the impression that Mozilla, and all of us, are at a crossroads here. I really hope they find a way to continue the development of Firefox and their other products without having to resort to prostituting people's identities.

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Out of curiosity, what problems do you see with potential Chromium (not Chrome)-based TOR browser?

It doesn't support the anti-fingerprinting measures of TOR.

I don't thing you can block fingerprinting in Chromium. We can only fake it. There is no flag to outright block the fingerprinting.

And things like first party isolation and other about:config tweaks.

Exactly what ffpip said. The TOR browser does much more than just run your traffic through TOR to counter website fingerpriting, and Google being an advertising company, I see a conflict of interest to provide you with the anonymity that the Firefox-based TOR browser currently provides.

tor "browser" is but not tor itself. for example brave (based on chromium) has a tor window built in. and its extremely handy for many use cases (not all but then for that other 10% you really should be running tails etc...)

I think the TOR browser does a lot more than just run a browser through TOR. It uses Firefox's built-in fingerprint counter-measures; it spoofs the user agent; it starts using specific window dimensions to counter resolution fingerprinting; and many more things that I am probably not aware of. Running a random browser through the TOR network does not really anonymize you from the myriad number of ways a website can fingerprint you, and the TOR browser / Firefox go to some lengths to protect you from those things too. I think Google, being an advertising company, would have a conflict of interest in providing that same level of anonymity.

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