What is Tor? In basic English, its an anonymous browser. This means when you use it your real IP location won’t get revealed unlike Chrome or Internet Explorer (each time you open the browser you’ll get a different anonymous IP  anywhere in the world)Why do people use Tor?To hide their identities when accessing the dark web or clearnet (normal internet). For the past 7 years or more I’ve been using it for normal internet use when accessing email or adult sites as I don’t want my usage linked back to my IP Why 4 stars?4 stars is for the whole 7 years I’ve been using it, but only 3 stars if this review was concerned solely with the past year or soGood points:1. Very easy to set up. You just download it (Tor Browser Bundle) as any Internet browser and you can start using it instantly.2. It works. It hides your identity3 Almost impossible for a regular person to work out who you are. Unless you’re dealing with the FBI or something4. Its free – Tor project only makes money through donations 5. You can use it for both darknet and clearnet like I did6. No need for a VPN service. You can just use Tor for freeI’ve been using Tor for nearly 7 years now to browse various clearnet adult dating sites so it would be unfair to give it any less than 4 stars considering what I’ve got out of it. That said, for the past few months the user experience has steadily declined 1. Verification checks seem to be increasing on regular internet sites...One such example being Yahoo mail where I can hardly check my emails anymore. Nearly every single time I'm hit with a ‘Prove you’re not a robot’ verification check. This never used to happen before and I freely swapped between different accounts without any issues at all. Such a shame things have changed 2. Many clearnet (normal internet) sites have become unusable with Tor...Unfortunately the past few years has also seen many other sites come down hard on anonymous Tor users. This includes many discussion forums and classifieds sites like Craigslist and Gumtree3. Despite promises, Captcha is still a massive headache for Tor users...We were promised last year that Captcha challenges would be ended for Tor users (see the ZDNet article 20 Sep 2018 “Cloudfare ends CAPTCHA challenges for Tor Users”). This became a massive problem as you were hit with a never-ending loop of Captcha challenges but even after all that, you couldn’t access the site you wanted.  Sorry to say this problem hasn’t actually gone away but its gotten worse. A personal pet-hate of mine is Doublelist where you can end up spending 40 minutes to publish a two-sentence ad.  As I’ve already mentioned, in nearly 7 years I've never had a problem with Yahoo before but this past month even that's giving me trouble. Before I used to be able to log in to different user accounts in close succession without any issue at all, but now you can't even log into a single account without encountering a stupid verification check. It’s a real shame as Tor was really reliable for me for many years but for the past few months or so this seems to have changed.