That's incredible news I must say, however, that I find the hype about Apple's "NSA-proof" encryption very annoying: That's silly, because iCloud backups aren't encrypted, as explained in https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/22/apple-data/ (which has its own thread already).
This will not work unless Mozilla financially separates itself from Google. Partnering with FireFox in its present state will be the end of Tor. They'd be much better off partnering with one of the other Gecko browsers that isn't obsessed with advertising revenue or building their own ecosystem. edit. If this "integration" doesn't produce more relays and exit nodes, all it will do is overload the relays that we have.
I agree with you. TOR survived relatively well by being sort of a niche product, I'm afraid that going mainstream won't do it much good in the end...
CloudFront The major usability issue for Tor these days is websites (especially those using CloudFront) blocking all exit IPs (actually, all relay IPs). If enough Firefox users used Tor, websites couldn't get away with doing that. And for what it's worth, going mainstream (with everyone using it) has always been the goal (as I understand it, anyway).
There's still issues like https://panopticlick.eff.org/ describes, along with all the faults of the Tor button addon https://blog.torproject.org/blog/toggle-or-not-toggle-end-torbutton and the issues of running a Tor browser in your main OS (as opposed to Tails). Yeah, that's what I'm feeling too. Someone could argue it'll give Tor more attention and maybe people will run more exists as a result, but very few people will care enough.
Unless those FireFox users also become relays, I don't see it making any difference. Going mainstream is a worthwhile goal, but not by partnering with companies that track and data mine the users. Tor doesn't just make surveillance more difficult. It also interferes with tracking users, targeted ads, etc by making users all look the same. The only reason such companies would integrate with something that's harmful to their profits is to subvert it.
Mozilla <> Google. Google was their major source of income for many years, but that's mostly history. Mozilla has been looking at "what's next?" for a while, so maybe this move reflects desperation. Or maybe it's a return to fundamentals.
Introducing Polaris Privacy Initiative to Accelerate User-focused Privacy Online by Denelle Dixon-Thayer.