Proxy questions - technical help needed

[Decolonize The Left]

So I've got FoxyProxy and Tor, but I have little to no idea how to use them, and when I do, my internet is devastatingly slow and all the add-ons I have installed to Firefox don't work.

Can someone please explain why this is happening, how I can fix this, and what is the best way to use a proxy? I'd greatly appreciate it.

- August

[Q]

Yeah, I'd be interested aswell. I never got how proxy works.

[Niccolò Rossi]

Thirded

[mel]

Which addons don't work?

In any case, the way a proxy like TOR (with a proxy extension installed) works is that it routes all of your traffic for any application configured to use it through one or a series of other computers. No matter how well you configure it, it will, no matter what, slow down your access, and may bog down your network as a whole due to the extra overhead.

This is something different from say, anonym.to in that anonym.to does not route your traffic through it but merely masks your "referrer" (information sent to a webserver about which link you followed to get there) so that the site in question does not know your surfing habits.

Unfortunately, TOR has to disable all third-party plugins on the sites you visit for security reasons, such as flash and java (and possibly javascript) in order to protect your anonymity (those plugins cannot be made safe) so you have to make the tradeoff between security and speed when using TOR. I'll do some more research into it and see if I can't find any better alternatives, but as of right now, that is the tradeoff you need to make.

Finally, you should consider the torbutton extension, from what I gather, it makes it easier to switch surfing with tor on/off so that if there is traffic you don't mind having non-anonymous, you can turn it off for that traffic to get a speed improvement.

Edit:
Another option is to have one browser configured permanently for TOR, and another for all your other browsing. You can surf with TOR on the one browser, then for your non-anonymous traffic you can surf on the other in another window.