Vidalia is a GUI for tor, letting you start it, stop it, change identity, monitor your connections, etc. Torbutton toggles if firefox goes via tor or not and monitors to make sure it still does and nothing has changed and changes some settings to make attempt to prevent accidental leaks. Current broswer bundles is usually pretty much a browser with torbutton, vidalia and tor. Tor itself will no doubt still be able to proxy other things (such as pidgin or other non-web traffic). I'm not sure what exactly forking the browser would entail, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly meant to provide a full separate (and neutral looking to the server) browser rather then have people flip back and forth which has always been a bad idea since it's very easy to accidentally have it give you away. If the bundle itself includes Tor or not is hard to say. If chrome + tor (started with vidalia rather then command line, if you wish) is secure is debatable, perhaps or perhaps not - it's never been a project they've really focused on. Third party or roll-your-own setups are as secure as you make them.

[EDIT] You're welcome. Chrome via proxy in incognito on a separate install is probably pretty safe. Might even be safer - I'm not really qualified to answer either way. The bundles are only as safe as the writers as well, so.. dunno.

I didn't mean for my post to come off as rude, but it seems strange to just assume that because one thing is canceled, a completely different tool with a different name would be canceled, and to be fair, 10 seconds with Google gives a better summary of Vidalia than I could do, but I'm flattered you reviewed my comments.

Additionally, while we're here, you should really reconsider how you're using Chrome. If Chrome is like Firefox, it does NOT tunnel it's DNS requests by default. Firefox, for example, (at least with 3.6) won't resolve .onion links unless you select the option to tunnel DNS requests. It means that you're likely leaking DNS requests to potential watchers.

Others like javascript and Flash can be equally insidious. If you're using Tor, it would behoove you to use the Tor Browser, or at least the Bundle as it has very sensible default settings for protecting yourself.