Tor and Mozilla team up  – Mozilla announced that the Tor Project and the Center for Democracy & Technology will be part of their new privacy initiative called Polaris, a collaboration to bring even more privacy features into Mozilla’s products. We are honored to be working alongside Mozilla as well as the Center for Democracy & Technology to give Firefox users more options to protect their privacy.

Why Mozilla?

Mozilla is an industry leader in developing features to support the user’s desire for increased privacy online and shares the Tor Project’s mission of helping people protect their security online. At the core of Mozilla’s values is the belief that individuals’ privacy cannot be treated as optional. We share this belief. Millions of people around the world rely on the protection of the Tor software and network to safeguard their anonymity. We appreciate companies like Mozilla that see the importance of safeguarding privacy. The Tor volunteer network has grown to the point that large companies can usefully contribute without hurting network diversity. The Tor network will get even better with Mozilla’s help, and we hope that their participation will encourage even more organizations to join us.

The initial projects with Mozilla will focus on two areas:

Engineering support:

The Tor Browser is built on the Firefox platform and we are excited to have the resources of Mozilla’s engineers to help us merge the many Firefox privacy fixes into the Mozilla codebase. The increased attention from Mozilla will give us time to focus on finding and fixing new issues rather than maintaining our fork.

Network Support:

Tor’s network size constrains the number of users that can use Tor concurrently. In the short term, Mozilla will help address this by hosting high-capacity Tor middle relays to make Tor’s network more responsive and allow Tor to serve more users.

We believe that the Tor Browser is one of the best ways to protect privacy on the web and this partnership is a huge step in advancing people’s right to freedom of expression online.