Is this purely for anonymity purposes, as he seems to imply? It seems like quite the workflow when a (relatively) modern anonymity tool like Tor would probably be fine.
I wonder if it's deliberately complex to discourage easy, shallow browsing, or if he has some other rationale.
RMS just has a workflow, developed probably sometime in the late 80's and nearly only involving emacs. He also uses a Lemote Yeeloong (which can barely run ancient versions of IceCat), and runs it in a tty most of the time with just emacs.
TOR is bullshit because it's a festering pile of assholes all trying to pretend that no one knows what no one is doing, without knowing who's doing the pretending not to know.
C'mon, guys, I'm serious. Please don't sniff my
exit node. It's not nice, you know! We're all
supposed to be mysterious strangers, and not know
each other, but still implicily trust all participants
even though we'd never do that in real life. And oh, by
the way, here's a browser bundle that still uses
third party cookies, and runs javascript by default,
but fuck the world, because javascript is hella
convenient, and animated web pages are just super cool!
I wonder if it's deliberately complex to discourage easy, shallow browsing, or if he has some other rationale.