From the download page to the first onion
The setup is four steps and none of them are long. The one that matters is the slider, and the one that trips people up is the first load, which is slow by design, not by fault.
The download
The installer is on the Tor Project’s own site, one page, three operating systems. The only trap is the search result that is not the project, because a typosquatted domain around the project’s name has hosted a backdoored installer before. The address bar is the check, and it is the same check as every other page on this list.
The slider
The shield in the toolbar sets the security level. Safer turns off scripting and the fingerprinting features, and it is the setting the market is built to run at. The highest setting is for the paranoid and the slow, and it blocks a little of what some pages need. The default is the middle, and the middle is where most people should stay. The setup page walks through it step by step.
The first load
The first connection to a given onion takes ten to thirty seconds, because the browser is building a path, not loading a page. The second is faster, and the third is the same. A first load that hangs is a circuit problem, and a new tab on a new circuit clears it more often than a reload does.