What is Tor?
Tor is a separate, secure internet. To quote Wikipedia:
“Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.”
Tor was originally developed in the 1990s and today is used worldwide by people who need to browse the internet anonymously. For example, it is commonly used by journalists and activists operating under repressive regimes. Onion websites require the installation of Tor, or the installation of Tor Browser in order to visit .onion websites.
Tor Setup
Tor for Desktop
The easiest way to browse onion websites is to download the Tor Browser. Tor Browser is almost the same as Firefox web browser, but has built-in support for Tor. Simply downloading Tor Browser will let you visit onion websites right away.
Note, you can also install Tor itself instead of Tor Browser, which will route all your traffic through Tor, not just your browsing activity. A guide for installing Tor can be found here.
Tor for iOS and Android
The Tor Project endorses the following mobile apps for browsing onion sites on mobile:
iOS:
Android:
Enable Javascript for ProtonMail
Tor Browser / Desktop
Tor Browser disables Javascript by default, but you will need it for our onion site. You can do this by clicking the “NoScript” button and selecting “Temporarily allow all this page”:
Android
You will need to enable Javascript by uninstalling the NoScript plugin entirely (unfortunately disabling NoScript just for ProtonMail doesn’t work for unknown reasons).
- Click the 3 dots menu button in the top right corner.
- Select “Tools >” then “Add-ons”.
- Select “NoScript”.
- Scroll to the bottom and select “Uninstall”.
3. Visit Our Onion Site
Once you can access Tor and have Javascript enabled, you can visit our onion site here:
For more information about ProtonMail’s onion site, you can also read our Tor announcement blog post.