Install Tor Browser the right way

Tor Browser is the only browser that opens the market, and the setup takes about ten minutes if you do it in the right order. The goal is a browser that is configured for privacy before you ever type an onion address, not one you patch up after you notice something is leaking.

Download it from the source

Get the installer from the project's own site, not from a mirror that someone linked in a forum. The difference matters because a repackaged installer is the classic way a "clean" browser ends up carrying something it should not. Verify the download the way the site tells you to, which is a signature check, and if the signature matches, the file is the one the project built. On a machine you already trust, the signature step is the whole security argument, so do not skip it because it feels like bureaucracy.

Set it to Safest

Once installed, open the security slider and move it to the highest setting. This disables JavaScript by default, which sounds inconvenient until you learn that the market is built to work without it. The slider also hardens a few network defaults, and the cost is that some ordinary websites render a little oddly. You are not using Tor Browser for ordinary websites, so the trade is free. Leave the slider up and only touch it if a specific site genuinely needs the script, which the market does not.

The three mistakes that give people away

The first is installing it next to a browser extension manager and letting an extension load on the first run, because extensions are the main way a "private" browser learns your habits. The second is using the same profile for work and for the market, which merges two lives into one fingerprint. The third is downloading the browser on a machine you already use for everything and treating the install as a privacy boundary, when the boundary is only as real as the machine behind it. None of these is dramatic. All of them are quiet, and all of them are fixable in the same ten minutes you spent installing the thing.