Visiting darknet/ Tor sites with Firefox

Question

Instead of using the Tor bundle, I have done the full routing for Tor in my Linux router ; including DNS as in resolving DNS via Tor

I can pretty well open .onion sites using lynx or wget.

However when using Firefox either in my FreeBSD or MacOS machines it says Site not found. What is happening?

P.S. I am aware of the security implications. This question is more concerned why a plain Firefox browser is not able to open such an address.

Answer 1

Nowadays for security reasons, the Firefox DNS resolver blocks names ending up with the domain .onion by default.

You have to perform the following steps:

• Open about:config;
• It will then complain about "This might void your warranty!" (duh?), you click "I accept the risk"
• Then in the search field above your write onion; the keyword network.dns.blockDotOnion will appear;
• Double click on that line, the (boolean) Value field with change from true to false

Presto, your firefox can now open .onion sites.

According to this page, this new setting has been added in newer versions of Firefox (starting from the version 45.0).