Firefox’s free VPN will offer 50 gigabytes of monthly data, which is pretty generous for a browser-based VPN. A Mozilla account is required to make use of it, which isn’t a hardship (they’re free), but is a point of friction some may wish to know upfront.
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This announcement comes suspiciously close to the announcement of them including a lot more AI bullshit.
How far Firefox has fallen. This is really sad to see.
Just use Mullvad then instead of this roundabout way of using Mullvad.
ofc, this is a free alternative, not a mullvad competitor
“Just use Mullvad instead” is good advice compared to almost any other option.
Unfortunate that to get this experience in Firefox, we will have to disable a built-in feature and download some extension.
idk about you, but when I use a VPN I want all the device’s traffic to go through it, not just the browser. So I’d always disable the built-in feature in that case.
This isn’t using Mullvad.
If anyone missed them removing the “we will never sell your data” from their promise to their users, this is clearly their next step in monetizing their users.
This is exactly my worry. Usually the reason a VPN is free is because they’re selling your data on the backend. No thank you.
Aha so that’s why they have been sabotaging themselves in the last few years. To allow for higher bandwidth per user on their vpn!!
I don’t trust mozilla though.
Make a crypto wallet add on. Make a VPN with crypto payment channel settled once a week. Charge fair price of 2-5 cents per GB.
Alternarively use probabilistic payments but that’s bit of inconsistent for the end user
Make a crypto wallet add on. Make a VPN with crypto payment channel settled once a week.
Go use brave if you want to use a crypto trash browser
Remember when people said “go to Brave if you want a built-in VPN trash browser”?
Just give it a few months
*crapto
Processed by LLMs no doubt.
I loved Mozilla for years but trust nothing from them these days.
And an ai watchdog to keep you clean
Holy shit, people really lose any rationality when it comes to AI, don’t they?
Mozilla mentioned integrating AI, got flak for it, reversed gears. Everything is optional and opt-in now.
And yet, a third of comments here are crying about Big Bad Firefox AI coming to eat them at night.
Yeah… #doubt
Firefox ftw. Thanks firefox for making my surfing great.
And how exactly do we know for certain that all that juicy web access data complete linked to whatever identifying information associated with a Mozilla account isn’t going to be sold?!
Same as every other vpn???
Other vpns aren’t integrated into your browser that you’re globally logged in into.
Nah just integrated in your machine
I mean, depending on the word integrated. Everything is integrated in a sense. But it’s harder to be more integrated than being literally the same app.
Of course, my mozilla account will have the name John Smith and I was born in 1996.
The same could be said about any VPN out there. Read the ToS and privacy policy, and either believe it or don’t.
True, but Mozilla being what it had been the past few years I trust them no further than I can throw them
Edit: pay the few dollars for mullvad
Yeah, sadly Mozilla lost most of the trust one would have given to them in advance a few years ago.
So they know it’s you all the traffic comes from?
They also know it’s you when you don’t use it. I’m not sure how is it worse? Seems like a handy way to go around geoblocks.
Uhm, what? Maybe my ISP knows, but they are regulated (at least here). But VPN is a virtual direct-line to another server.
Another server that belongs to the same company as your browser, so they have an access to both ends of the direct line. If you don’t trust Mozilla to be thrustworthy vpn server (which is good, shouldn’t trust anyone), bad news, they already have an access to your whole traffic because they own your browser
But unlike the VPN server, the browser is on my end and i can make sure it doesn’t rat me out. Coincidentally, my policies.json over the years was almost the same as Waterfox’.
People’s conception of what VPN actually does is skewed by shady ads. Now they hear VPN and assume it’s suppose to be this unbreakable anonymizer that somehow also secures you from some unspecified dangers.
A VPN to me is a way to prevent my ISP from seeing I torrent and to go around geoblocks. It’s not a privacy tool at all. So yeah, I’m evaluating them from that angle.
every fucking youtuber is sponsored with those ads i hate this timeline
its better than betterhelp i guess
Exactly. No thanks. Nothing is ever “free”.
If something is free then you are the product
How does that sqaure away with FOSS?
You are either going to donate, or spread word to others, who will pick it up and donate themselves.
Money still gets made, its just less opportunistic and predatory, and more a reward from those who can afford, to fund for those who cant.
You are [building] the product?
Interesting. I’d actually pay for an in browser VPN, it’s handy to be able to switch countries on the fly. Ideally even per browser tab.
I would not however pay for Mozilla’s mullvad thing. I don’t like mullvad since they dropped port forwarding and OpenVPN. I use proton now for that. But in the browser is a different usecase for me.
It’s just weird that it’s not possible to pay for this but only for the thing I don’t want.
I keep hearing about people dropping Mullvad for port forwarding…why do y’all need port forwarding while trying to stay anonymous?
Torrents, you can’t peer with other people behind NAT.
AFAIK torrent. But I’ve been torrenting all my life without port forward and I have all the seasons from my favorite Linux distros,.
It is basically a requirement in most private trackers. Either because it literally is, or to be able to hit seeding limits quickly.
If I can’t download it without jumping through yet more hoops, I’m sure I don’t really need that particular Linux distribution.
The free option is limited to a certain amount of GB. Mozilla can upsell an unlimited version in the future. Likely the reason they don’t do that right from the start, is that their VPN network is completely new and it’s hard to judge the network capacity needed.
Yeah, but they also added an AI feature that’s enabled by default that I never asked for.
And I normally advocate for Firefox. It’s been a good solid privacy focused browser for a while but now I’m starting to think maybe not as much.
Still better than the Chrome-alikes, but all the same I’ve switched to Librewolf. Problem is, foss mozilla teams like Librewolf are small and underfunded, and their ability to continue sanitizing and debloating the app forever is not garaunteed. A new vanguard FOSS browser project is needed, ideally one that continues the Netscape lineage of open and non-coercive web standards with a more durable and democratic organizational structure.
Removed by mod
Vivaldi is Chromium, which I avoid because I consider it an advertising corporation’s attempt to erode open web standards.
Ladybird alpha is schedueled for 2026. Hopefully that has a beneficial impact.
Absolutely
“Free” as you pay with your data?
with a 50GB quota, I actually believe it’s free. I use 15-20x that much on an average month.
I’m sure that’s the condition, to use your data (that they protect of course) to better improve the browser. And I’m sure they are in a country where they don’t have to show logs (that I’m sure they don’t keep, yet somehow use your data).
They need to stick with just the browser, period. Stop trying to drift into other areas. Firefox has unfortunately gotten too heavy for what it should be, and adding even more features (good or bad) doesn’t help the core performance.
The other options out there have their pluses and minuses, but if Firefox keeps pushing people will live with the negatives of the browsers that seem to care about the browsing experience of their users.
I generally agree but
They need to stick with just the browser, period. Stop trying to drift into other areas. Firefox has unfortunately gotten too heavy for what it should be, and adding even more features (good or bad) doesn’t help the core performance.
they are trying to find better ways to finance themselves than google search contracts. that’s why they are coming up with all their paid services
~~ No, Mozilla uses Mullvad as a partner, they’re a serious and nolog VPN provider.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-search-warrant-customer-data-not-compromised ~~ EDIT: Didn’t read the article, the free VPN won’t be using Mullvad apparently.
It doesn’t seem like it, or at least there’s zero evidence I’ve seen that this is the case. As the linked OMG Ubuntu article speculates, probably the main benefit financially is making users more likely to sign up to their paid VPN.
Aside: Based on their blog post, the service seems like a proxy rather than a VPN.
in which they hand it over to thier cash cow, google.
Yep!
