Saturday, 2 June 2012

Torbutton works differently now: you can't turn it off any more

The way torbutton works has been changed and it can not be disabled anymore when the addon is active. You'll have to disable or remove the addon itself to not use the torbutton in firefox.

Whenever you try to click on the tor button icon to disable tor, you'll see the following information:

Torbutton works differently now: you can't turn it off any more.

We made this change because it isn't safe to use Torbutton in a browser that's also used for non-Tor browsing. There were too many bugs there that we couldn't fix any other way.

If you want to keep using Firefox normally, you should uninstall Torbutton and download Tor Browser Bundle. The privacy properties of Tor Browser are also superior to those of normal Firefox, even when Firefox is used with Torbutton.

To remove Torbutton, go to Tools->Addons->Extensions and then click the Remove button next to Torbutton.


If you don't like to have torbutton always enabled in firefox, you can instead use the tor browser bundle which consists of patched version of firefox made to work with better privacy. The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.

You may continue to use tor by disabling the torbutton but manually configuring the tor proxy configuration by going to Edit menu - Preferences - Advanced - Network - Settings from where you can choose Manual Proxy Configuration(This may be different in windows OS, probably in Tools menu).

First uncheck the Use this proxy for all protocols if it checked. Then in the Socks Host field, type 127.0.0.1 and 9050 in the corresponding port field. Screenshot below can help you.


Now you can use tor connection without any need to install torbutton. I hope this helps. :)