[tor-talk] need only tor-browser firefox and chrome

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 06:08:01PM +0530, Raviji wrote:
> I am running tor, polipo, ttdnsd and pdnsd at system services.
> Is there any tor firefox and chrome available without these
> components ?

Not currently. Right now the only safe way to use Tor as a client
is with the Tor Browser Bundle.

See https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ for the variety
of issues that it addresses. Running a separate Tor is possible in theory,
but we assume you'll get it wrong so we discourage it.

Note that on Linux and OS X, the Tor in TBB picks a random port, so it
should be compatible with (or at least not conflict with) a system Tor.

But see https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-bundles-security-release
which says "The random port selection has been temporarily disabled in the
Linux and Mac OS X alpha bundles. Most of you probably didn't notice any
random port selection happpening at all, but if you encounter a problem
running a system Tor and your Tor Browser Bundle at the same time, you
can switch to the stable bundles for now. The next update should have
a fix that allows us to re-enable automatic port selection."

See also
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#TBBSocksPort
and
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#TBBOtherBrowser

--Roger