[tor-talk] To Toggle, or not to Toggle: The End of Torbutton

[Greg Troxel]

  The reason I am discussing this in so much detail here is because I
  believe there is a chance that there are users out there who rely on
  the toggle model and/or their OS Firefox build, and may be confused or
  enraged by the new model. I'm asking this list to get an idea of how
  many of those users there are, and to try to understand what the
  overall costs of this sort of migration are.

It's not clear to me how your proposal relates to other-than-Linux.

I'm using firefox on NetBSD/i386.  I don't understand how this "Tor
Browser Bundle" will appear and be integrated into the OS packaging
system.  Will it be a renamed copy of firefox, requiring twice the
packaging effort?  Or very close to existing firefox?  It seems that it
has been difficult to get fixes upstream to firefox; there are currently
66 patches to xulrunner sitting in pkgsrc.

Or is this a firefox-tor that uses the same xulrunner?  I would, without
understanding, expect that the hard issues are in xulrunner.

I don't find the notion of installing tor and then adding torbutton to
be at all confusing.

I can certainly see your point about toggling being difficult.   I don't
know if a plugin that makes you restart the browser after changing to
Tor mode would be a big simplification and avoid the bugs.   I would
find that to be a great solution, as browser restarts are very fast and
have no software maintenance/packaging issues.

Reading your note, it sounds like the basic issue is unwilling of the
firefox team to take and deploy bugfixes you think are important for
security/privacy.  After all, if you can fix them in a fork, the issue
is about not wanting them, or finding the usefulness/cleanliness ratio
not high enough.  Is that a fair characterization?