[wilfra]

That's what I always thought about tor as well, but today I downloaded and have been using this - and it was/is as simple as installing and using any other browser:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

I'm probably still missing a few layers of security if I want to order a pound of purple kush or a hitman or something though (right?)

[pkhamre]

I ran into the problem of a big memory footprint and the tor browser running really slow (on my quite fast laptop with i7, ssd and 16 gb mem)

[thelukester]

When I was living in China, I used Tor daily to circumvent the great firewall. Back when the Tor bundle was using Firefox < 15, it has some bad memory leaks, but Mozilla has done a great job of fixing those. Chrome has turned into the memory hog. Chrome 2x memory usage has gotten so bad, I’m actually thinking about finding an old full install of a 0x or 1x for my laptop.

As far as it being slow to load sites, there will always be a high latency when using Tor. It’s the nature of onion routing. If Tor becomes more popular, I’m hoping there will be a way to donate to high bandwidth exit nodes to keep the network performance up.