What will Mozilla do about the Tor network's usability problems? Advanced users can workaround them and because they understand the benefits and engineering, accept the frustrations as a cost for a worthwhile (and free) technology. But what will non-technical users do?
Many public Internet websites filter connections from the Tor network, many other websites are very slow, yet others impose extra obstacles such as multiple rounds of captchas (even 5 or more) or degraded service (including high suspicion of payments), and of course you often will receive webpages in the wrong locale or language - which can trigger regional filters. Currently, workarounds requires resetting the circuit (few non-technical users will even understand what the circuit is), lots of patience and reloads, and often just giving up. [EDIT: And non-technical users won't understand what is happening and therefore won't know when to use which workaround.]
If that's the experience of typical Firefox users, they won't use it and they will have bad associations with Tor and Firefox.
They aren't Tor network usability problems. They're clear web network usability problems. It'd be great if more people used Tor, NoScript (yes, I know this will not be baked in), and other privacy protecting mechanisms so that clear web sites would care about the users they're intentionally making the experience worse for.
A huge number of people use adblockers, and websites haven't changed to make the experience better. All they've done is changed to block anyone using adblockers, which is what many sites/networks already do to Tor.
There are many things in the Tor Browser that benefit privacy that are separate from the use of the Tor network, and it's these things that Firefox is most likely to adopt.
Which sites in 2018 still present multiple CAPTCHAs to users with cookies and JavaScript enabled?
I think the theory behind this project is that those problems are primarily caused by Tor's popular image as a 'fringe network for pedophiles and drug dealers' and that by making it more mainstream they can fix those issues.
(please more replies saying "that sounds really hard" and less replies saying "tor is not a fringe network for pedophiles and drug dealers", thanks)
Google has always been showing captchas when using their search engine for quiet a long time (even for VPN users). In fact they were even straight blocking users from using that very same captcha: https://bugs.torproject.org/23840
I more meant that Google offers a captcha service for others that is quite good, them implemented a really terrible one for the internal services. It truly is awful to deal with. Whoever made it must have been smoking crack or taking large quantities of lsd
Source? Cloudflare did post a moderately hostile response to Tor a few years back, but their technical implementation is sound and does not present multiple CAPTCHAs to users who have cookies enabled (the CAPTCHA might be broken with JS off, but that's a Google problem).
Even I have seen CF captchas on multiple sites when using Tor. Though might be because of my usage pattern where I use Tor for a selective list of sites giving CF less chance to maintain my identity.
Many public Internet websites filter connections from the Tor network, many other websites are very slow, yet others impose extra obstacles such as multiple rounds of captchas (even 5 or more) or degraded service (including high suspicion of payments), and of course you often will receive webpages in the wrong locale or language - which can trigger regional filters. Currently, workarounds requires resetting the circuit (few non-technical users will even understand what the circuit is), lots of patience and reloads, and often just giving up. [EDIT: And non-technical users won't understand what is happening and therefore won't know when to use which workaround.]
If that's the experience of typical Firefox users, they won't use it and they will have bad associations with Tor and Firefox.