It will not open. Let’s find out why.
In the large majority of cases the market is fine and something in the last few hops is not. Work top to bottom. Most people find their problem in the first three items.
- Are you actually in Tor Browser?
.onion addresses do not resolve in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge. They resolve in one place: Tor. “Address not found” or a DNS error in a normal browser is the expected result, not a bug. Open the same address in Tor and compare. - Did a character get dropped or swapped?
Compare the address in your address bar against the copy above, last six characters first. One wrong letter and you are loading someone else’s site, which may sit and spin forever, may show a page you do not recognize, or may be waiting for a password that will never match. - Is the circuit stuck?
Click the onion icon in the toolbar. If the path shows a circuit that has been building for minutes, choose “New circuit” and reload the page. A circuit that dies and rebuilds three times in a row usually means the entry nodes on your path are saturated; a new one is the fix. - Are you refreshing during the queue?
The “Do not refresh the page” screen is doing exactly what it says. A reload does not hurry the queue, it re-queues you. Put the phone down. - Is this mirror just slow right now?
The three addresses carry different loads at different times. If one sits for 15 minutes, open one of the other two. Same market, shorter wait, nothing lost. - Is your network blocking Tor?
Office, campus, and hotel Wi-Fi regularly throttle or flat-out block Tor entry nodes. Test on mobile data. If mobile works and Wi-Fi does not, and you need the Wi-Fi, run a VPN in front of Tor. - Is Tor Browser current?
An old version eventually gets its entry nodes blacklisted by the network. Update from torproject.org and try again.
If your “it will not open” is actually a white page with a spinner saying you are being forwarded to the market, you have opened it correctly. You are inside the door, and the door is slow. See the access page for how long is normal.
If nothing above matches
Try the same address from a different device on a different network. If it opens there and not here, the problem is your machine or your network, and the list above is where to keep digging. If it fails everywhere you try, wait an hour and try again: mirrors do have genuinely bad windows, and coming back is a legitimate fix.
And if you are not sure whether the problem is the market at all, the status page is where the difference between “the market is down” and “my circuit is down” gets sorted out.