I have written/adapated a firefox extension that provides a 1-click way for
users to enable or disable tor. It adds a panel to the statusbar that says
"Tor Enabled" (in green) or "Tor Disabled" (in red). The user may click on the
panel to toggle the status. If the user (or some other extension) changes the
proxy settings, the change is automatically reflected in the statusbar.
The extension also includes a button which the user can add to the toolbar. It
apparently is considered bad design for a firefox extension to automatically
add a button to a user's toolbar, so I added the statusbar panel. It might not
be as natural to click the statusbar, but it is easier to see, and it has a
tooltip to make it more clear.
I have tested it with Firefox 1.5, and I hope it also works with older versions
but I don't have any to test it with. Firefox extensions can be installed by
windows software installers by adding a registry key, so this could be
distributed in the Tor/Privoxy combo installer. See this page for details:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Adding_Extensions_using_the_Windows_Registry
If you would like to try it out, TorButton 1.0 can be downloaded from
http://zargon.hobbesnet.org/~squires/torbutton-1.0.xpi
(BTW, XPIs are simply zips of the extension soucecode.)
If Firefox doesn't ask you if you if you want to install it, choose "open file"
from the file menu and open it that way, it should then prompt you whether you
want to install it.
Regards,
Scott