Onion Browser 17+

Even when it says it’s disabled it doesn’t really disable it.

I’m giving Onion Browser 5 stars simply because it’s open source, endorsed by the Tor Project, and is maintained by a Tor developer in addition to having some of the best security features and just overall usability.

That being said it definitely has room for improvement. I’ll list some of the issues I have and things I think should be improved. But keep in mind that despite this, I would still recommend Onion Browser for any iOS user and I strongly believe it’s the best option out there.

1) Can’t search on “Secure” setting. I tried with all 3 of the default search engines and none of them work. Of course, you get a warning using the “Secure” setting that most sites will break in one way or another, but with the official Tor Browser you are still able to use something like DuckDuckGo on the most secure settings. On the bright side, they’ve so far handled this by allowing you to set individual settings for each site and it seems to remember it. So the quick fix is to set your search engine to “Moderate” security and it should work. I still find that you could only use DuckDuckGo from the browsers search bar on Moderate, but as soon as you open up the DDG website and search within the site itself, it wouldn’t work.

2) User agent & fingerprinting: From the little testing I’ve done, it seems Onion Browser doesn't protect your user agent by default. Sites can see you’re using iOS xx.x and will believe you’re using Safari. However, I believe this is just a limitation in iOS, but I’m not sure. Assuming it is, this isn’t so much of a complaint, but rather something users need to keep in mind.

3) Default search settings: It’d be really helpful if we had the ability to set custom default search engines. As far as I could tell, you’re limited to DDG onion, Google, and StartPage. I’d be great if we could set our own defaults to perhaps DDG clear, Searx, Qwant, etc.

4) Open with warning: I’m aware Onion Browser has some issues it just can’t fix due to the limitations of iOS. But I think the least they could do is add a warning when you start the browser, perhaps while it’s connecting to the Tor network just to inform users of exactly what they’re protected from, and what they’re not.

While I appreciate that using a VPN service can definitely provide added security and anonymity, I very much dislike that the wonderful Tor Onion Browser now forces you to use a VPN, a very specific VPN of their choice. Whether or not we wish to use a VPN system should be our choice, and has nothing to do with the Tor onion system. Having to install VPN software that interacts with all of your devices Internet connections, no matter what the app, even with some degree of turning it off for certain situations, is simply just unacceptable. We should be able to choose if we want to use a VPN or not, and if so, we should be able to choose which VPN we use. With that, I’ll be deleting and no longer using this Onion Browser on my devices, and will be using alternate ways/apps to access that network. Very unfortunate as the Onion Browser was very handy, simple, clean and a separate self-contained app (before this change).