554303 - Onion routing built-in

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 901614

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, enhancement, P3)

Description

[ryan14]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 

The new version of firefox should include an Onion routing feature. If you don't know what Onion routing is then read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

Basically by firefox having this feature built into it, means people from countries where they censor the internet(eg. china) by blocking certain websites will be able to access these websites again.

Currently there is a software called "tor" which can be found at torproject.org that has it's Onion routing software bundled with firefox, but firefox should include tor with it or firefox should have it's own Onion routing feature.
The Onion routing feature options could be found where the proxy settings are. Onion routing should be disabled by default. Every time firefox is closed Onion routing should be disabled just in case users forget.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Tor isn't for general purpose use, if you don't understand what it really does. For instance, read <http://www.torproject.org/download.html.en#Warning>. Without further aid (for instance using Torbutton, which is NOT what Joe Sixpack would like), you're still not anonymous.

It would also make Firefox impossible to use in various countries, or in many companies. Besides, some networks block Tor traffic, it's quite easy to do.

I recommend WONTFIX. People that really want to use it, can download Tor themselves, or using a combined Tor/Firefox package (for instance, using Vidalia).

Comment 2

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

There are a number of reasons why this would be hard for us to do, not the least of which what would happen to the Tor network once millions of Firefox users showed up to access it.  But nonetheless, projects like this and Herdict seem far to important to quickly wontfix.  Joe Sixpack should be able to have the same powerful tools as people who are informed, and giving various populations of Joe's Sixpack this type of tool could lead very important and significant effects.

Comment 3

[ryan14]

(In reply to comment #2)
> There are a number of reasons why this would be hard for us to do, not the
> least of which what would happen to the Tor network once millions of Firefox
> users showed up to access it.  But nonetheless, projects like this and Herdict
> seem far to important to quickly wontfix.  Joe Sixpack should be able to have
> the same powerful tools as people who are informed, and giving various
> populations of Joe's Sixpack this type of tool could lead very important and
> significant effects.

Why would it be hard? TOR is open source. And guess what, TOR have already integrated itself with Firefox and it's available for download here:

http://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en

Problem is, alot of people in countries like iran, china, etc, don't know this.

That is why you should integrate TOR into the official Firefox version that everyone downloads. TOR is updating their server capacity right now.

Comment 4

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Please don't mess with the priority

Comment 5

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Doing anything with 360 million users ends up being hard, even the easy stuff :)  Also there are a lot of complex network considerations where we would need to gracefully degrade and inform the user in the event that it doesn't work at all.  Not impossible by any means, just more complex relative to a lot of the other stuff we are working on, with perhaps the exception of Weave.

Comment 6

[ryan14]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Doing anything with 360 million users ends up being hard, even the easy stuff
> :)  Also there are a lot of complex network considerations where we would need
> to gracefully degrade and inform the user in the event that it doesn't work at
> all.  Not impossible by any means, just more complex relative to a lot of the
> other stuff we are working on, with perhaps the exception of Weave.

Oh okay so if you do decide to do this, when do you think you would do it? This year? Next year?

And what other stuff are you working on at the moment?

Comment 7

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>Oh okay so if you do decide to do this, when do you think you would do it?

Things are settling into place for the next major release, so the likely earliest would be sometime after that, and that's assuming that this can build up enough momentum to be included in the plans, or alternatively a contributor does the implementation outside of the official plans (a good number of Firefox features take actually that later path).

>And what other stuff are you working on at the moment?

Here is the full list of current Firefox projects: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects (not counting awesome features that contributors might take on on the side and will still land)

Comment 8

[ryan14]

(In reply to comment #7)
> >Oh okay so if you do decide to do this, when do you think you would do it?
> Things are settling into place for the next major release, so the likely
> earliest would be sometime after that, and that's assuming that this can build
> up enough momentum to be included in the plans, or alternatively a contributor
> does the implementation outside of the official plans (a good number of Firefox
> features take actually that later path).
> >And what other stuff are you working on at the moment?
> Here is the full list of current Firefox projects:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects (not counting awesome features that
> contributors might take on on the side and will still land)

by momentum do you mean votes? How many votes would my suggestion need to get enough momentum to be included in the plans?

Comment 9

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>by momentum do you mean votes?

no, more mindshare which is harder to quantify.  Something that people in the community are talking about and really excited about.

Comment 10

[Danny Moules]

Unfortunately if anyone in the communities that most need it publicly ask for it they risk consequences. It is, after all, a tool for preventing people knowing what you're doing - this assuming they are even allowed to know it exists.

I might be interested in going down the unilateral implementation route. If I can pop a flaky implementation into a nightly and rabble-rouse about it then it might garner wider support.