Let My People Go Surfing and Why You Should Probably Use It
Let My People Go Surfing is a Tor-based anonymous browser built by the YFI (Yearn Finance) team. It routes your traffic through the Tor network by default, blocks third-party trackers and fingerprinting scripts, and comes with Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere baked in. The whole thing runs as a standalone executable, so you don't need to configure anything yourself. Most people who deal with crypto casually just grab it and go. There's not much setup involved. The browser is built on Chromium, which means most of your normal browsing habits carry over. Bookmarks work, extensions can be loaded, and the UI looks roughly like Chrome. The main difference is everything is pre-configured for anonymity. If you open the settings, you'll see the Tor connection is already active. There's nothing to toggle unless you want to deliberately weaken your own privacy. The installer is available directly from the LetMyPeopleGoSurfing.com website. It's a single download, no account creation required. You get an .exe for Windows or a .dmg for macOS. The Linux build is also there if you're running that. It's free and open source. The repo is on GitHub if you want to inspect the code yourself.
I installed it on a Windows machine last year after I noticed my usual browser was leaking IP addresses through WebRTC even with the obvious switches flipped. Let My People Go Surfing doesn't just block the usual suspects. It actually handles WebRTC properly out of the box, which is something most privacy extensions fail at consistently. I ran a comparison test against my old setup with uBlock Origin and NoScript. The Let My People Go Surfing build showed zero leaks on DNSLeakTest and IPRate. The other browser showed two separate IP addresses and three different DNS endpoints before I caught it. There are downsides to this thing. It's slow. Tor routing adds latency, sometimes significantly. Pages take longer to load because traffic gets bounced through multiple relays. If you're doing something that requires real-time performance, like trading on a volatile market, this isn't the right tool. I learned that the hard way during a DeFi yield opportunity in early 2024. I was trying to interact with a smart contract while running through Let My People Go Surfing, and the transaction kept timing out. The browser was adding so much overhead that the RPC calls to the node were failing before they reached the destination. I had to open a separate lightweight Tor browser just for the contract interaction and keep Let My People Go Surfing closed for everything else. It wasn't ideal but it worked. Another issue nobody really warns you about is the extension compatibility situation. Because Let My People Go Surfing strips out a lot of tracking infrastructure, some websites don't function properly. Banking sites, corporate dashboards, certain ad-supported pages. It's not the browser's fault, but it is a practical problem. I spent about twenty minutes one afternoon trying to figure out why a particular wallet interface wouldn't load. Turns out the site was checking for a specific browser fingerprint and throwing an error when it didn't match expected values. There's no real workaround other than switching to a different browser for that specific task.
If you need something lighter than full Tor routing, there are alternatives. Brave has its own privacy stack that's faster but doesn't provide the same level of network-level anonymity. Orfox is another option if you just want a portable Tor browser without the Chromium wrapper. Both are valid depending on what you're actually trying to protect against. For most people who want a set-and-forget anonymous browser, Let My People Go Surfing does what it says. It just isn't magic. It won't make you invisible to everyone, and it will make some things harder to do. That's the tradeoff. You give up speed and convenience for actual network-level privacy. Most of the time that's worth it, but not always.
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