If safety’s a concern, you probably won’t mind waiting a few extra seconds or dealing with the trial and error of searching with Tor. What it is good for, though, is if you want the most privacy possible when conducting research on a particular topic. Tor isn’t the browser to use as your go-to, and it’s not going to be fast enough if you rely on the internet for work or creative pursuits. What good is all that protection if you can’t find what you’re looking for, or at least find it quickly enough? And even with all of the benefits it offers, a browser should work out of the box in order to be appealing to users. Unfortunately, Tor proved faulty during our first few searches. It doesn’t track you or store your personal data, and it also has a mobile version, so you can maintain your safety no matter what device you use to go online.

Plus, Mozilla is much more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing, which makes it a compelling alternative to the Tor browser.Īlso, while it’s not a browser, the DuckDuckGo (opens in new tab) search engine is already very safe to use. Those include private browsing, tracking protection, ad blockers, cryptominer blocking, and a password keeper, for starters. Mozilla Firefox (opens in new tab) is one of Tor’s major competitors, as it’s also a browser that’s heralded for its safety features. Since Tor’s main selling point is that it’s so safe, its biggest competitors are other browsers that boast top-notch safety. There are multiple languages (opens in new tab) to choose from, and you also have the option to download and try the alpha version (opens in new tab). Tor downloads are available for Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. Moreover, Tor can’t provide the utmost protection when it comes to media plugins, and they’re disabled by default. And if you’re doing more than searching, like streaming content or making a video call, odds are it’ll be even more laggy.

It seems that speed is a common issue with the Tor browser, an unfortunate side effect of it being volunteer-run. The workaround for slow speed is to click the New Tor Circuit for This Site option in the upper-right menu, but that didn’t seem to speed anything up when we tried it. Searching with DuckDuckGo returned results in English, but it took several seconds to complete the search. When switching to Yahoo, the results came up in the wrong language, even though the browser was set to English. We encountered some language problems when trying to use Yahoo's search engine with Tor (Image credit: Yahoo)

What is the tor app