The Mozilla Foundation isnt stupid. It knows that many people are worried about their online privacy and really arent keen on being tracked or spied upon by advertisers and spy agencies. And so to cater to this group of paranoid Web users, the maker of the popular Firefox browser has just launched a new initiative called Polaris, in partnership with the Messiah of Internet privacy the Tor Project.

Two projects have been devized under the initiative. The first one sees Mozilla and the Tor Project working alongside the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) to create privacy technology, open standards, and future product collaborations, according to Tors Andrew Lewman. Mozillas engineers are working to see how they can make Tor better and faster, which is significant because the Tor browser uses much of Firefoxs code.

Mozilla didnt reveal what improvements its working on to make things better, but it did say how it plans to speed things up. This will involve Mozilla hosting its own high-capacity Tor relays to boost the networks current, limited capacity.

Mozilla engineers are evaluating the Tor Projects changes to Firefox, to determine if changes to our own platform code base can enable Tor to work more quickly and easily, said Mozillas Denelle Dixon-Thayer in a blog post.

As for the second project, this sounds even more exciting and could potentially lead to a significant rise in Tor usage. Mozilla says its working on an experiment with its nightly builds to develop a way to keep advertisers happy without having to track people all over the web.

[It looks at] how we can offer a feature that protects those users that want to be free from invasive tracking without penalising advertisers and content sites that respect a users preferences, Dixon-Thayer said.

She added that the experiment was far from finished, and would be refined over the coming months as they received feedback from users.

Its not clear exactly what this experiment entails, but it does sound an awful lot like the rumored Tor button for Firefox. If this feature is indeed implemented into the main Firefox browser, given its popularity, its likely there would be an explosion in the number of people using Tor, not too mention more explosions of rage from senior US law enforcement officials 🙂

What with Facebook having recently launched a special URL optimized for people using Tor, its about to become a whole lot easier to remain anonymous when were browsing the web.

Excerpt from:

Better Tor-gether? Mozillla bids to bring anonymous browsing to the masses