Tor itself is not what I was referring to, although it has its problems as well, mainly that it's extremely identifiable. Tor is not a good idea for most people to use full-time.
The rest of this doesn't really answer my question about Safari vs Firefox, and I'm pretty much uninterested in appeals to Tor Browser as something that should be universally adopted.
The main point your link is making is that Tor Browser is purposely a monoculture to avoid fingerprinting and monocultures are bad for security because it gives attackers somewhere to concentrate their attacks. You're using this to argue in support of Safari as a monoculture on iOS?
Meanwhile, Tor Browser is based on Firefox ESR, but that doesn't mean they can't backport patches, which they regularly do.
> Tor itself is not what I was referring to, although it has its problems as well, mainly that it's extremely identifiable. Tor is not a good idea for most people to use full-time.
It's extremely identifiable as Tor, but that's exactly why most people should use it more of the time, so that it isn't regarded as suspicious when somebody has a more serious reason to.
You didn’t read the whole thing if that’s what you drew from it. Safari on iOS is used by everyone with an iPhone, Tor Browser is used (typically) by people with something to hide or a lot at stake, which makes it a singularly desirable target that is especially dangerous because it doesn’t receive security patches at the same speed as mainline Firefox. The monoculture is only part of the problem, the bigger part is using a browser with an inferior security model and leaving it hopelessly out of date. Using Tor with an up to date version of Chrome is much less hazardous to your health, and I really recommend that approach if you want to use Tor.
> It's extremely identifiable as Tor, but that's exactly why most people should use it more of the time, so that it isn't regarded as suspicious when somebody has a more serious reason to.
No. That’s just not going to happen, for a number of reasons, and hoping it does happen is not a strategy for helping the significant number of people who are already using it because they do have a serious reason to, and are consequently at risk because of how vulnerable their browser is.
Not in the sense that you can de-anonymize people easily (though easier than you might think) but that it makes your traffic identifiable as Tor traffic, which can be worse than the anonymity benefits. VPNs (setup with WireGuard, possibly via Algo, though never a commercial provider) are a better choice for most users.
You misunderstand me. Tor Browser is based on Firefox ESR, which means it lags with security updates: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/tor-and-its-discontents-ef51648...
Tor itself is not what I was referring to, although it has its problems as well, mainly that it's extremely identifiable. Tor is not a good idea for most people to use full-time.
The rest of this doesn't really answer my question about Safari vs Firefox, and I'm pretty much uninterested in appeals to Tor Browser as something that should be universally adopted.