Confession time: I run uBlock Origin in Tor Browser.
The docs explicitly say not to do that, because any modification to your browser settings makes you more fingerprintable. For that reason, I run the default filter lists instead of the highly customized turned-up-to-11 setup that I run on clearnet Firefox, but I just can't stand the web without any adblock at all. If I had to look at ads while using Tor Browser, I'd use it a lot less.
(Also. Blocking tracking scripts is a good thing. If you have a Very Determined Adversary, you should absolutely follow the expert recommendations, but the main actors in my threat model are off-the-shelf analytics scripts and in my non-expert opinion I suspect I'm getting a net privacy gain from avoiding low-effort attempts at data collection. IF YOU HAVE AN ACTUALLY SERIOUS NEED FOR ANONYMITY DO NOT DO THIS.)
If you feel weird, as I did my first time using Tor, about taking up a community resource that others need more than you: don't. The network has capacity for you. There are middle nodes to spare and, in practice, enough exit node bandwidth to go around. Connections to some sites - notably most sites hosted through Cloudflare - transparently switch over to .onion-style connections that don't even go through an exit node. A Tor user's anonymity comes from hiding in the crowd of all Tor users, so you make the network better by using it. Maybe don't stream a lot of high-res video, but in a civilization building out network capacity for streaming, text-based pages are too cheap to meter.
I am technically not adding to the size of the primary Tor Browser crowd, at least as concerns adversaries that bother to distinguish adblock users from others, but not all adversaries are that sophisticated, and I can't be the only one running the stock uBlock Origin settings. Join me! More users is a good thing.
A lot of sites serve CAPTCHAs to Tor users because traffic coming from exit node IPs is frequently up to no good. I want to live in a world where, when a site operator sees traffic from Tor, they have reason to believe that it might be coming from a valuable user. The way we build that world is to (1) be valuable users and (2) use Tor.
I've been using Tor Browser for some tasks for years now, but the last time I switched distros I installed a system Tor daemon too, and now I have FoxyProxy set up to send regular Firefox traffic to certain domains through Tor automatically. It's even less anonymous than my uBlock'd Tor Browser setup - the Tor Project has very good reasons for shipping a custom browser and if you're doing something serious you should use it - but it's still a step up from clearnet and it works without my having to remember to turn it on.
Accessing sites through Tor is notably slower and that's not a tradeoff I'm usually willing to make, but it can be nice to automatically slow down connections to, say, HN in a way that disincentivizes procrastination without being so inconvenient that I'll just turn it off. I'm also willing to put up with the slowness when talking to ecommerce sites or my bank because I really want to set the precedent that transactions initiated from exit node IPs can be legitimate.
(I can also access .onion sites in plain Firefox now, which is kind of cool, especially seeing as I'm a dev on a site that has an onion address.)
There's no extra user-visible latency when I add torsocks to background jobs, like the script that sends my daily backup to BorgBase, or the loop running git fetch on the main repo at work on a fiveish-minute randomized timer. I had NixOS downloading packages over Tor for a while, but that made interactive package installs slow enough that I turned it back off. (Also I wanted to experiment with pkgs.fetchtorrent for my system Kiwix install. Long story. Always in motion is the system configuration.)
To the folks who route all traffic leaving their home networks through Tor at the router level: You inspire me. I'm not willing to go quite that far, but thank you for blazing the trail; I'll be here, taking a few small steps in your direction.
2026-10-06
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