Customizing Tor Browser for Disposable Whonix Workstation

I had no problem customizing Firefox for a fully volatile disposable VM. I just set up the browser in an offline appVM, converted the appVM into a disposable template and created a new disposable VM based on the disposable template.

But when I attempt to do the same thing with a whonix-ws VM, the settings don’t persist. I am able to set up Tor Browser in a standard appVM based on whonix-ws-16. Subsequent reboots retain the browser configuration. But when I convert the VM to a disposable template and create a new disposable VM based on that template, the launched browser reverts to default settings.

Any idea what that is?

This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the default settings for Tor Browser were secure. I would just import bookmarks from vault each time I started the VM. Easy enough. But somehow the developers thought it would be a good idea to disable the most secure settings by default. Now it takes me 5 minutes to tediously enable dozens of settings before I browse.

1 Like

Also, for clarity, I did not use the term “dvm” when naming the disposable template. So unlike the conclusion drawn in this post:

… the issue is created when template_for_dispmvms is set to ‘true’. Somehow, as soon as the appVM is defined as a template, the current Tor Browser configurations are replaced with the default config. Any attempt to open Tor Browser in the actual template are rejected with warnings not to open Tor Browser in a disposable template.

So how do I reconfigure the insecure default settings in Tor Browser in a disposable workstation?

1 Like
4 Likes