One trade off that has to be made for the anonymity Tor provides is that it can be considerably slower than a regular direct connection, due to the large amount of traffic re-routing.

It keeps a user anonymous by encrypting traffic, sending it through other nodes of the Tor network, and decrypting it at the last node to receive your traffic before forwarding it to the server you specified. Through this process the onion proxy manages networking traffic for end-user anonymity. Tor employs cryptography in a layered manner (hence the 'onion' analogy), ensuring forward secrecy between routers. This software connects out to Tor, periodically negotiating a virtual circuit through the Tor network.

Users of the Tor network run an onion proxy software on their machines, which presents a SOCKS interface to its clients. Its primary goal is to enable online anonymity by protecting against traffic analysis attacks. The Tor Project ( The onion routing) is an open source implementation of onion routing that provides free access to an anonymous proxy network.

What does tor onion browser do