Tor Project, any advice for someone who wants to try it?

[Lethn]

I've been hearing about the tor browser quite a bit and there are a number of things that I'm curious about with the thing, how good is it? How secure is it? I'm no security expert at all as you lot might already know but I have been doing reading on it and it has gained my interest quite a bit but for a noob like me would it be safe or should I maybe look at some tutorials etc. or does it operate like a perfectly normal browser and I'm overthinking things?

The reason I ask all this is because in my poking around I noticed that there were a few articles out there describing incidents where the writers talk about people who have found vulnerabilities in the browser, to be expected of course if you're going to improve a network but it does have me concerned. I was thinking of switching from gmail ( The interface alone is beginning to really piss me off ) to tormail instead.

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[01BTC10]

Whonix is more secure but if you use the Tor browser bundle then disable Java. Also, I think Tormail might have been compromised by the US government.

edit: I tested the Tormail onion URL and it's down. Even if it's get back online, I wouldn't trust it.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

Freedom Hosting was the host of Tormail...

[Lethn]

Ahh, okay guess I'll do some more poking around then, thanks for the link, not sure about an operating system though .

[01BTC10]

Ahh, okay guess I'll do some more poking around then, thanks for the link, not sure about an operating system though .

Whonix uses 2 virtual machines. It can run on any system using Virtualbox or VMware.