Tor Browser For Mac

Tor is a free software and open network specially designed to help you protect your privacy and defend against various forms of network surveillance.

The Tor project is based on the Onion routing technique, once part of a secret project of the U.S. Naval Research Lab, and is developed and maintained by the open source community.

Tor prevents the monitoring of your Internet connection by hiding your identity and preventing IP address-tracking back to your Mac.

In order to protect your connection, Tor uses various servers from around the world and reroutes your URL request through multiple servers to hide the path from your Mac to the destination URL.

Tor Browser is a simple an easy-to-use package that installs and help you manage the Tor project software on your Mac. The installation process is pretty straightforward, you just have to download the ZIP archive, extract and launch the application.

The Tor Browser app is based on Firefox and includes the Vidalia network connection utility. Thanks to Vidalia the connection to the Tor network is automatically achieved every time you launch Tor Browser.

The Vidalia Control Panel enables you to configure and manage your connection to the Thor network. You also have the option to Use a New Identity, view the Bandwidth Graph, open the Message Log and View the Network.

Tor Browser's interface is similar to Firefox 17.0.8 with the exception of the Tor-specific features such as NoScript, the Torbutton and SSL Observatory. From the Torbutton slide menu you can request a new identity, open the Cookie Protection manager and the Preferences window.

By accessing the Torbutton Preferences window you can configure the proxy settings and enable or disable various security settings such as "Disable browser plugins", "Restrict third party cookies" and more.

Another useful feature is the portability of the application. Tor Browser Bundle is self contained and, as a result, it can be run off a USB flash driver without the need of installing the app.

As it turn out from our tests, Tor Browser is smooth-running and easy-to-use, however, you will notice a speed drop when it comes to internet browsing caused by the constant traffic rerouting.

On the whole, despite the decrease of the speed of your Internet connection, Tor Browser is worth installing if you really want to hide your location and value your privacy above all else.