New Release: Tor Browser 8.5.3

> All the more reason for the Tor devs to stop dumbing down the product

I don't think that's what Tor Project is doing. Rather, they have recognized--- and they are correct--- that in this dangerous world, everyone needs Tor regardless of what government they live under or what their personal political/religious beliefs or social status are, etc., which means that TP must grow its user base. In addition, moving to a user-supported funding model is needed to insulate TP from undue pressure from the spooks of any one government, in particular the USG which has not played a very nice role globally for many decades and which is particularly dangerous to Tor Project and thus to Tor users.

> why did they take away the convenient turn off javascript checkbox

I don't recall a checkbox, but I used the slider (now renamed "security level")

> in the config menus and force us to use about:config?

Well, you can still use the security slider to turn off javascript, AFAIK.

As I understand, the rationale for discouraging users from making lots and lots of "customizations" is that

o customizing makes users less anonymous,

o extensive customizing break things TP has done to enhance both security and anonymity.

I think we all need to recognize that both maintaining/developing Tor products and using Tor products involves constant tradeoffs between usability, security, and anonymity. TP needs to try to make the best decision for the greatest number of Tor users in every case, without keeping the kind of intrusive and dangerous personal data about each user that companies like Google do, so I think we all need to give them more credit than some of us are inclined to do.

> It's also that users who actually have security requirements CAN'T get them out of the box.

I don't understand what personal security requirements you desire which you feel Tor is not enabling you to easily obtain, or why you think you need these particular security requirements. Your requirements might well appear legitimate, at least to me, maybe not to some government, if you explained. Some governments might be tempted to assume that any Tor user who wants good security must be working for some "opposition entity" about which said government is feeling particularly paranoid.

For example, currently USG is feeling paranoid (probably with justification) about ransomware targeting more or less hapless US city governments. Tor users who would be adversely affected by a successful ransomware attack on their own municipal government would probably find themselves in rare agreement with USG on that point.

So we certainly don't want to encourage Tor users to be manipulated into taking a position supporting anything done by the USG or any other government. We need to see ourselves rather as a virtual nation comprised of good citizens whose legitimate needs are very evidently not being met but are rather being crushed by our bricks and mortar governments (and by corporations such as Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter). C.f. the huge study which showed that the opinions and expressed desire of ordinary US citizens has had no visible effect whatever on US federal government policies over the past sixty odd years; rather, government reliably follows the advice of corporate lobbyists who often write the new laws which are then passed by their politicians who effectively represent the billionaires, the big banks, and international conglomerates, but certainly do not represent The People. No doubt similar studies in other supposed "representative democracies" would reach the same conclusion.

Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and other figures have made similar points for many years.

@pelethar,
I'm not sure what you mean by "it THINKS I'm connecting through."
The country of the exit node shown *IS* the exit from Tor network and the entry node (guard) *IS* the country you're entering the network through.

You don't say what your objective is, but you need to read the https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en. Editing the torrc file (which is empty). You can do things like list countries that you want to use for nodes, or exclude countries you don't want to use.
Don't make the list too short of acceptable countries to use, or you may see big slow downs or connection problems.
Don't make a list of countries to exclude too large, or you may have the same problems. Tor might override your torrc settings to make viable connections.
This is how you list countries to use:
ExitNodes {an},{at}...
ExcludeExitNodes {au},{ca}...
StrictNodes 1
Capitalization matters. There's a space between ExitNodes & the 1st country, but no spaces between country codes - just a comma separator.

Using StrictNodes with a value =1 (enabled) tries to force it to use the countries listed.
If you have too few listed, it may use others to maintain a connection (I'm not positive & still investigating.