Why YSK: Tor provides a secure, anonymous access to the web to people who can’t do it carelessly like we do (journalists and citizens of authoritarian countries for example).
Snowflake is a legal, zero effort way to help those people access the internet. If you’re interested in how it works, here’s the explaination I’m not including for the sake of brevity.
To actually use snowflake you just have to install the official browser extension
- for firefox
- for every other browser
- no safari afaik
That’s it, just make sure the extension is up and running and never worry about it again, it will do its thing and never bother you or even make you notice it’s there. It’s inexpensive in terms of resources too.
Thanks for bringing some attention to this.
To add to the OP, if on linux or macOS, you may want to consider running a standalone proxy. Contrary to the browser extension it allows more than one connection at the same time and is more beneficial to the tor network all around.
Setting up is more than trivial following the instructions linked above, meanwhile snowflake got packaged for Debian, Ubuntu and a few others as well.
For macOS users there’s is a homebrew package available.