Tor is great, but it's always running in the background...
I love Tor. I like how Icecat makes it so that when you are in private mode it routes everything through Tor. My problem is that Tor is running all the time, many many websites will not let me look at them if they detect a Tor node active at my IP address. How do I make it so that Tor is not running at startup, but only when I need/want it to? (When I go into Private browsing mode)
Having the tor daemon running in your computer is not detectable from the outside. What you are experiencing is that -as stated in the torproxy addon popup- while you have one private window open *all* traffic from the browser goes through tor. You cannot have non-private and private windows use different proxy settings, so that is unavoidable. To browse without tor, close the private windows.
I almost never have the private window open. It happens even when I don't have it open.
[edit] My proxy settings were messed up. Nevermind! I'd still like it to not be running on startup though.
I am a translator!
You can remove tor and then you download tor browser bundle from the tor website, which is more secure then usin it with icecat..
sudo apt-get remove --purge tor
sudo apt-get autoremove
https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en
cheers
you can disable tor by manipulating the daemon through upstart.