Operator: Portable Anonymous Opera Browsing

Filed under: Security, Windows, Freeware, Browsers

Operator: Portable Anonymous Opera Browsing

by Lee Mathews Aug 10th 2008

I'm not a big Opera fan, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Operator - a portable version with built-in Tor (hence the semi-clever name) anonymous browsing.

Download the 7mb zip and extract it to your flash drive, and you've got an excellent way to keep your surfing on public and work computers safe and private. I was surprised with the speed at which pages loaded, having used TorPark to cure my insomnia back in the day. Part of the boost comes from integrating Polipo, a tiny caching web proxy that Operator bundles with the browser.

Our home page loaded in about 22 seconds, a little over twice as long as it took Firefox. Not bad, considering the added security and privacy.

As the author warns on the Operator home page, only HTTP and HTTPS are anonymized by Tor, so avoid Javascripts and Opera's IRC functions to play it safe. For road warriors - and the truly paranoid - Operator is well worth a test drive.

Operator is freeware, Windows only.

Tags: anonymous browsing, anonymous surfing, AnonymousBrowsing, AnonymousSurfing, opera, tor

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Tom said 2:52PM on 8-10-2008

Don't you mean avoid Java? javascript acts over HTTP...

Grant Robertson said 10:33PM on 8-10-2008

An HTTP or HTTPS request made from within a Javascript (i.e. XMLHttpRequest() ) may not be anonymous.

ffatman said 6:30PM on 8-11-2008

It's runnig under linux+wine (i've tried under Ubunru) without any problems. For max anonimity no java, no js, no flash, no cookies, no Google Toolbar, no ActiveX, no RealPlayer, no Quicktime, no Adobe PDF plugins and addons and no cookies (clean everything everytime after session without TOR/Polipo).

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