Arguably the world’s most popular website for downloading torrents*, The Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.sx) is known for being particularly rebellious against government censorship and anti-piracy corporate policies. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’ve launched a full-fledged web browser that allows you to circumvent censorship imposed by governments of countries like China, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, and United Kingdom, etc. We go hands-on after the jump!

The PirateBrowser – as it is officially named – is built on top of what is currently the latest version of Firefox (Firefox 23). It comes packed with the Tor client for tunneling traffic, the FoxyProxy add-on, and some unspecified “custom configurations” that allow you to access blocked Internet content.

If you aren’t aware of it already, Tor – or ‘The Onion Router’ – is a worldwide anonymity network. The network runs thanks to donated bandwidth of volunteer users and organizations. Tor users get connected randomly to one of three thousand Tor relays to access blocked content, which anonymises their internet activity and helps bypass blocked content.

It looks and works almost exactly like vanilla Firefox. I tested it locally, and was able to successfully view videos on YouTube despite its blockage at ISP-level here in Pakistan. It was certainly slower than a high-quality, paid VPN solution, but it is completely free, so you can’t really complain.

PirateBrowser is free of ad-ware, spyware, toolbars and other such annoying things.

On its official website, it says that the PirateBrowser doesn’t offer any anonymity when surfing the internet even though Tor client promises it.

By the way, now that we are on topic, you should know that you can help others maintain internet anonymity and bypass government restrictions by enabling ‘Help censored users reach the Tor network’ from Tor Control Panel > Settings > Sharing.

At the moment, PirateBrowser only supports Windows. The Pirate Bay hasn’t made any promises about releasing it on OS X or Linux, but since this is cross-platform-friendly Firefox running with cross-platform-friendly add-ons, I expect it to be ported over in a matter of weeks, if not a few days.

PirateBrowser is available for free as a self-extracting executable. It is a portable app, so you do not need to install it; simply double-click on the EXE file to launch and use it.

Download PirateBrowser for Windows

*Technically, you only get ‘magnet links’ that point to where the selected torrent’s data is stored – The Pirate Bay doesn’t directly host any .torrent files.

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