The Mozilla Foundation is looking for a more effective way of integrating Tor in Firefox and seems willing to spend too much money on that target.
Better Tor integration is one of the key points Mozilla is willing to fund through the program Research Grants 2019H1 announced by the agency last month.
This program he's been using it for quite some time, and it's how he pays the bills to develop new Firefox features.
So companies, individuals and academics can apply for the program and receive funding for one of the 12 research topics that Mozilla is interested in solving.
One of these 12 topics is "Privacy & Security for Firefox", where Mozilla said it was looking for a more efficient way to integrate Tor into Firefox.
Tor may be running Firefox right now, but this integration slows down Mozilla's browser a lot.
"Enabling a large number of add-ons for users to use the Tor network requires development as there are inefficiencies, to make the protocol better and eventually grow on a large scale," says Mozilla.
Academic research begins with simply exploring architectural alternative protocols, and route selection protocols such as Tor-over-QUIC, employing DTLS, and Walking Onions.
Which alternative protocols and route selection protocols would offer acceptable benefits to Tor performance and retain Tor properties so that it is really possible to deploy Tor on a large scale and how will Tor and Firefox be fully integrated?
To that end, Mozilla is willing to provide research grants to help you discover the best way to integrate Tor into Firefox without the current performance losses.
Any work in this area will eventually result in a new function tours in Firefox which will be called Super Private Browsing (SPB).
What is the goal?
If Firefox manages to get a Tor-protected private browsing feature, it will be the second major browser to do so - the first being Brave. Of course, it should be mentioned that it is the only way to hit Google's rival browser right now.
Ironically, although Brave was founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, Mozilla cannot use Brave's integration with Tor as Brave runs on Chromium – the same platform on which it has been developed Google Chrome.
The fact that Mozilla wants to eventually integrate Tor into Firefox is no surprise. Since 2016, Firefox engineers have ported the functions privacy first tested in Tor Browser back to Firefox through a project called Tor Uplift.
The transfer of the real software Bringing Tor and the Onion protocol to Firefox is what a lot of users are looking for, but it's not an easy task to do, especially when you have to make changes to all the architectures that Firefox is currently running on.
