[tor-talk] browser with best privacy without using the Tor network

[Chris]

> We already offer this. See the Expert Bundle,
> https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en#windows.

That is for Microsoft Windows and am pretty confident that it is not the
same thing.

The TBB has plug-ins and other configuration changes in it to enhance
security such as the HTTPS Everywhere plug-in. If you install Tor and then
use a generic copy of Firefox you won't get the same results and your
fingerprint is much more likely to be unique.

I read over some documentation on how to build the TBB from scratch.
Unfortunately it appears very old. Based on some of the newer faqs I am
fairly confident that it has not been updated in a long time. For instance
Firefox is compiled from scratch for the TBB in order to include some
security enhancements. I'm not sure what is being added, removed, or
changed.

At the time I read the documentation on how to build the TBB from scratch
it seemed like many plug-ins probably weren't needed. While I don't recall
if this was one I'll give a factious example. Instead of disabling
scripting entirely there was a plug-in to disable scripting. It would
probably be better to disable it completely if the plug-in wasn't doing
anything else. Less code and the user can't accidentally enable scripting.
If there was a plug-in for Tor and non-Tor mode the same thing would be
true.

> Another
> option is to compile from source. We provide copy and paste directions
> for building Tor on all platforms, it's just more work on Windows.

The advantage of doing a TBB with all the plug-ins and changes with a
separate copy of Tor is it would make fingerprinting harder. A few simple
changes would probably be all that were necessary so that the browser
bundle without an internal copy of Tor and instead have it use an external
copy of Tor. It would then retain all the other security enhancements.