Those include private browsing, tracking protection, ad blockers, cryptominer blocking, and a password keeper, for starters. Mozilla Firefox (opens in new tab) is one of Tor’s major competitors, as it’s also a browser that’s heralded for its safety features. Since Tor’s main selling point is that it’s so safe, its biggest competitors are other browsers that boast top-notch safety. There are multiple languages (opens in new tab) to choose from, and you also have the option to download and try the alpha version (opens in new tab). Tor downloads are available for Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. Moreover, Tor can’t provide the utmost protection when it comes to media plugins, and they’re disabled by default.

And if you’re doing more than searching, like streaming content or making a video call, odds are it’ll be even more laggy. It seems that speed is a common issue with the Tor browser, an unfortunate side effect of it being volunteer-run. The workaround for slow speed is to click the New Tor Circuit for This Site option in the upper-right menu, but that didn’t seem to speed anything up when we tried it.

Searching with DuckDuckGo returned results in English, but it took several seconds to complete the search. When switching to Yahoo, the results came up in the wrong language, even though the browser was set to English. We encountered some language problems when trying to use Yahoo's search engine with Tor (Image credit: Yahoo)

Tor browser for iphone 4