My main concern is that this will be hidden behind an option or an "extreme private" mode -- Tor seems too high-latency for the typical use-case of private browsing (image viewing and video streaming).
If you run a web service and would like to provide high-security anonymous access, consider running an Exit Enclave -- a Tor exit configured to exit only to your site. If Tor detects that your exit and your site share an IP address, it will automatically extend the normally 3-hop circuit to your node, and the traffic will exit the Tor network on your machine rather than an arbitrary node (which could be malicious).
I hope this finally kills the "only criminals use Tor" narrative the NSA and periodically, the media push. Everyone deserves strong anonymity.
[0] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ExitEnclav...:
To add to your point, effectively using Tor means disabling JavaScript.
For what it's worth, DuckDuckGo has done this for the past 4 years[0].
I think StartPage is still the default for the Tor browser bundle, but I'm not sure if they have an exit enclave as well.
[0] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/duckduckgo-now-o...
But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times.
Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going to pay for 100x or 1000x server capacity?
(This is the original source for the Dot article.)
A summary: Raw bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in scaling Tor; before you just plug in traffic to the network, you'd need to optimize Tor's internal protocols to make expansion of the network even possible. However, those hurdles are fairly small, and once they're handled, it's just a matter of funding to pump up more nodes, which is much more simple.
Further, not all Firefox users (if the article's speculation is correct) will be using private browsing at once. So the actual increase is probably 5-10% (at most? anyone know actual statistics about private browsing?) of that number.
I wish someone would integrate crypto currencies into the layers of the Tor onion. I could imagine paying a few cents for each unlayering. Basically you just include a private key for a wallet holding 0.0000n cents in each layer with perhaps 0.000n for the exit. But I guess this will take some time for intuition to adapt to it.
I would assume that the organisation supposedly integrating Tor would have to fund tor exit and bridge nodes in mass. Or just force users using this alternate private mode to also share bandwidth in a p2p/skype like manner.
I realize it's often for good reason that the bundles are minimalistic, but I see no fundamental reason why I should have to relinquish bookmarks and personal settings to stay anonymous, and it would be great if this could spur a greater drive to make it clear what extensions are safe or new browser architecture that would make it safe to use add-ons in general with Tor.
That would really set it apart, in my opinion.
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Mozil...
Well, more sad than funny.
At the same time, if every Firefox user donated even $1 to Mozilla, they wouldn't need to take this money[2], and could probably be a bit more carefree in these decisions.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2012/f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
EDIT: I am literally giddy with excitement over this prospect. Had to come back to add that
