“UX” stands for user experience, and Orfox’s solution to making it easier for users was to turn the settings question into a simple slider with three settings: “standard”, “safer” and “safest”. This was the first time Tor did a full development cycle following UX best practices. Nevertheless, after old-fashioned testing with a small group of users, says Tor: However, the Tor developers haven’t really known how users configure the browser because the browser doesn’t collect data on how users interact with it. In other words, there’s not much point offering a high level of privacy if the app is difficult to configure – and if it’s hard to configure, it can leave users exposed. Since the Orweb app was shuffled into retirement in 2015, Orfox’s beta has been the browser the Tor project offers to Android users to access the network, in conjunction with the partner Orbot proxy client on which it runs.įrom its earliest days, the point of Orfox was to offer the same privacy that Tor users would get from the Project’s desktop browser – but without making configuration a chore.

The news emerged in the latest Android version of Orfox to reach the Play Store and The Guardian Group’s GitHub repository, version Orfox-1.4-RC-3 running on mobile Firefox 52.2.0.

Something small but potentially significant thing happened in the world of Tor this week: the app has added the security slider from the desktop Tor browser, meaning it’s easier for users to set predetermined levels of privacy without getting bogged down in settings they might not fully understand.