Is a HTTP proxy really necessary with Tor?

Now that one can use Tor directly with remote DNS resolution through network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true, do we still need to use a HTTP proxy?

Why do people still use Privoxy with Tor?

Or Polipo - which I understand does a lot less filtering than Provoxy but is now bundled with Tor (at least for Ubuntu)?

Thanks.

 

Tor provides a multihop (3) solution to providing anonymity w/encription toward privacy. Only the first Tor node in the hop knows your ip address, but not the second nor the last hop. Only the last hop knows the destination you requested, if the DNS resolves the request. So, yes, Tor provides a 3-hop http proxy solution.

My impression is that without using Tor, one would need a service like Xerobank to get full anonymity as it uses VPN tunneling with a lot more features/services than most other providers which some at most only provide 1-hop which is less private and therefore less secure. Also, unfortunately, Xeroback is expensive.

Privoxy provides additional filtering of browser identity as I understand it (for the paranoid), but does not do pipelining which polipo takes care of for better performance, i.e. using Privoxy apparently slows performance.

-- Tom