The Pirate Bay releases censorship-thwarting browser

The operators of The Pirate Bay, one of the most (in)famous piracy sites on the Internet, have decided to celebrate the site’s 10th anniversary by releasing a web browser that allows users to access TPB or other sites censored in their country.

“PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), Firefox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs,” they explained on the browser’s official website.

“No bundled ad-ware, toolbars or other crap, just a Pre-configured Firefox browser,” they wrote on the blog post announcing the release of PirateBrowser.

They made sure to note that even though the browser users the Tor network, it won’t allow you to surf the net anonymously.

The browser will look very familiar to Firefox users but to others as well. It sports pre-loaded bookmarks to The Pirate Bay as well as to other torrent sites that are blocked in a number of countries (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):

Only the Windows version is currently available for download, but Mac and Linux versions will follow.

According to TorrentFreak, the browser is just the first step in TPB’s fight against web censorship, and a special BitTorrent-powered browser is currently in the making.

It will allow users store and distribute TPB and other websites on their own, making it “virtually impossible” to block them or shut them down.