The impatient approach from a tab I already had open

Tor Browser was already open with three other tabs. I opened the market in a fourth. This is what that costs and what it gains.

Why an already open tab feels tempting

Tor Browser starts slowly. Not scandalously slowly, but slowly enough that if it is already open, opening a new instance feels like a chore. So the impatient approach reaches for the browser that is already running and opens the market in a fresh tab.

The tempting feeling is the whole reason this article exists. The temptation is small, the cost is small, and the sum of the small choices is what the impatient approach is actually made of.

What actually stays between tabs

Tor Browser reuses the same circuit for tabs on the same site. It does not reuse the circuit between different sites. So opening the market in a new tab means the market gets its own circuit, which is what I want.

What is shared is the browser itself. Any extensions I added, any zoom levels I set, any bookmark bar state, any download folder. None of that is dangerous on its own. All of it is state the market visit is inheriting rather than starting from scratch.

A fresh browser starts with fewer inheritances. An already open browser starts with all of them.

The specific small costs

If any of the tabs already open belong to services I have signed into on Tor, those services can still see me as signed in on their own tab. That does not carry over to the market tab as an identifier, because the market tab is on its own circuit, but it does mean the browser I am using for the market is also a browser other services see me on. That is not zero.

The tab order gets mixed. When I later go back to close things down, the market tab is between the other tabs I had open. Closing them in the wrong order can leave the market tab open by mistake for longer than I intended.

The browser history on this session grows. Tor Browser clears history on close, but until close everything is remembered. An impatient session that goes on for a few hours accumulates history that is legible to anyone who can see the screen.

What I do to make it survivable

I open the market tab immediately after copying the address from this site, so the tab that comes right before it in tab order is a known safe tab. This makes closing everything down easier at the end, because I know the market tab is exactly one to the right of my copy source.

I do not switch to any other tab while I am doing anything on the market. If I need to check something else, I do that thing first, then come back to the market tab, then finish. Splitting attention across tabs is where the impatient approach starts producing real mistakes.

I close the market tab before I stand up. The other tabs can stay for the rest of the session. The market tab does not.

What I do not do from an already open browser

I do not open the address bar on the market page for anything other than pasting the address. Not for searching, not for typing a URL for something else and then coming back. The address bar in that tab is dedicated for the duration of the visit.

I do not paste anything from the market into a tab that is not on the market. Copying feedback text or a link out of the market and into a general tab breaks the isolation that made the reused browser tolerable in the first place.

I do not fund an account from an already open browser. Wallet moves belong on a fresh session, not on a session that was already up.

How this differs from starting fresh

Starting fresh gets me a brand new set of circuits, no history, no active identity anywhere, nothing to close carefully. The impatient tradeoff of not starting fresh is that I skip the slow browser startup and pay for it with a small pile of inheritances.

The impatient approach with an already open tab is fine for a very short visit. It is not fine for a long one. The longer the session, the more the inheritances pile up.

The address, and where it comes from

The three onion addresses at the top of this article are the same three the site publishes elsewhere. I copy one from the copy button here and I paste it into the new tab. I do not paste it from another already open tab that happens to have a copy in it, because I cannot always remember which tab a copied thing came from.

One source, one paste, one visit. That much stays true across every approach on this site.

A short list of mistakes I have watched myself make

• Switching to a work chat tab in the same browser to answer a message, and forgetting the market tab was open behind it for the rest of the afternoon.
• Dragging the market tab into a separate window because I liked the layout, then never closing that window because it looked like it had always been there.
• Autocompleting the market address in the address bar because it was there from an earlier visit. Autocomplete is not the paste I meant to do.
• Bookmarking the address by accident with a keyboard shortcut. Tor Browser clears bookmarks on close, but until close the bookmark bar has a thing on it that should not be there.

When I choose fresh anyway

On a day I am about to do anything that touches money, I close the browser and open a new one. The extra minute of startup is a small price for having no inherited state at all.

On a day I am about to do something I have never done on the market, same. Anything that will teach me something about myself that I do not know yet deserves a clean session.

The impatient approach with an already open tab is for the days when the visit is small, quick, and boring, and the browser had nothing embarrassing on it to inherit in the first place.

What this article is not. This is not advice. It is an honest look at what happens when the impatient approach starts from an already running browser rather than from a clean one.