What Tor Browser does
Tor Browser is a free, open-source web browser built by The Tor Project that routes your internet traffic through the Tor anonymity network before it reaches its destination. Instead of connecting directly to a website, your requests pass through a series of volunteer-operated relay servers in an encrypted chain — a technique called onion routing — so that the site you visit sees only the IP address of the final relay, not your own. The browser is built on the Firefox Extended Support Release codebase and ships pre-configured with hardened privacy settings that would take considerable effort to replicate manually. Anti-fingerprinting measures are applied by default, making it much harder for trackers to distinguish your browser from others using Tor. HTTPS-First mode is active, pushing connections to encrypted versions of sites wherever available. The NoScript extension is bundled and enabled, blocking JavaScript execution on untrusted sites to reduce the attack surface. On exit, Tor Browser automatically erases cookies, browsing history, and cached data from the session, so nothing is left on the local device. It also provides access to.onion addresses — special domains that exist only within the Tor network and are used by privacy-conscious services, whistleblower platforms, and news organizations for anonymous communication. Typical users include journalists communicating with sources in sensitive environments, researchers accessing information in countries with heavy censorship, security professionals testing anonymization, and anyone who wants to separate their browsing activity from their real identity. The browser runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This page links to the full offline installer bundle from The Tor Project's official distribution. Always obtain Tor Browser exclusively from torproject.org. The project publishes cryptographic signatures for every release so that security-conscious users can verify the download has not been tampered with.
