How to open .onion links

A .onion address isn't a domain name. It won't resolve in Chrome, Safari or Firefox, no matter how you type it — you need Tor Browser.

Why your browser can't open it

Regular addresses resolve through DNS: your browser asks a name server where example.com lives, and gets back an IP address. Onion addresses skip that entirely. The 56-character string is a public key, and the route to the service is negotiated inside the Tor network itself. There's no name server to ask, so a normal browser returns a DNS error.

That's also why no browser extension, proxy site or "onion opener" can make a .onion link work in Chrome. The address isn't blocked — it's simply invisible from outside the network.

Opening one, step by step

1. Download Tor Browser from torproject.org. Only from there — mirrors and app stores host tampered builds.
2. Install and open it. It connects to the Tor network on first launch.
3. Copy the full .onion address, including the http://.
4. Paste it into the address bar and press Enter.

On Android, Tor Browser is available from the Play Store and F-Droid. On iOS the Tor Project recommends Onion Browser, since Apple requires all browsers to use WebKit.

Checking an address before you use it

Onion addresses are unreadable by design, which makes them easy to swap. A single changed character points somewhere else entirely, and phishing copies of well-known services are common.

• Copy addresses, don't retype them.
• Check the full string, not just the first few characters.
• Current v3 addresses are exactly 56 characters plus .onion. The older 16-character v2 format was retired in 2021 — those links are dead.

What runs on onion services

The reputation is narrower than the reality. Onion services are how the BBC reaches readers in countries that block its site, how newsrooms like ProPublica and systems like SecureDrop take documents from sources, and how projects such as Debian and DuckDuckGo offer a route that doesn't depend on DNS or certificate authorities.

The property they share isn't secrecy but reachability: a service that stays available where the normal web is filtered, and that doesn't reveal where it's hosted.

Searching them

Onion services aren't indexed by general search engines — there are no links from the public web to follow, and no DNS to enumerate. Onion Engine searches an index built specifically for them. We list addresses; opening one is always your own step, in your own browser.