Mozilla and Firefox could be about to change the VPN and privacy market | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla and Firefox could be about to change the VPN and privacy market

techradar.com

120 pointslibab39 comments

> Firefox Send allows you to share large files securely (but not store them). The caveat being that you need to have a Firefox account to use all of the above ...

There's no requirement for a Firefox account, for Send. And it works well via Tor, with no CAPTCHA bullshit.

And, since it's a Mozilla product, you can self-host it: https://github.com/mozilla/send

I cannot express how much I love this service. Firefox Send is flat out the best way to send files securely over the internet by giving someone a URL (and optionally a password).

I use it all the time for its convenience and simplicity.

You don’t need a Firefox account for files up to 1GB but you do for files from 1 - 2.5GB in size. It says so right on the home page.

https://send.firefox.com/

As an aside, Firefox for Android is great for power users because it has extensions. It's much closer to feature-parity with desktop browsers than Chrome is, and offers more significant advantages over Chrome on Android than desktop as a result.

Yes! Firefox for Android is one of the primary reasons I haven't switched to an iPhone.

(There is a Firefox for iOS, but it's basically a skin on Safari because of Apple's restrictions.)

For power users, it's not just the extensions on Android (though it's a big part). It's the massively cross-platform for many years: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Android, BB10, MacOS, and more (I'm only listing the ones I've used in somewhat recent memory). To have that feature parity across so many platforms has immense value to me. I can support family, friends, co-workers.

I wish Mozilla would get into the email service market. I could really go for a reasonably-priced, ad-free, Gmail-sized, bring-your-own-domain email service.

There's speculation in TFA about Mozilla buying ProtonMail/ProtonVPN.

I hope it’s true. I’d love to support financially an added value service by Mozilla.

... thunderbird?

(I'm aware they're no longer maintaining it(?) but it's posed as a genuine option.)

Not only they're maintaining it again, but the number of developers assigned as been increased!

However, they intent the community picks its development up, eventually.

However, for now, thunderbird is being developed by Mozilla again, afaik

(i guess they understood there was the need for an e-mail client and that thunderbird was in a good place for competing.)

I, honestly, see KDE's Kontact as the ONLY decent OS alternative. Too bad it's not of easy install & support on windows... It would be a great e-mail client...

I think GP means a Gmail competitor, where Mozilla runs the servers for you.

It'd be interesting to see 'super private browsing mode' which has Tor integration be shipped with Firefox. Making Tor easier to use and more accessible for normal people is a huge win for privacy.

I know it isn't Firefox, but Brave is a Chromium-based browser that has Tor built-in with their 'Private Tabs'. It is a really nice privacy focused browser. Everything good about Chrome, without everything bad about Google.

> Everything good about Chrome, without everything bad about Google.

Except, of course, its use of the chromium engine, which is something I think we should fight against. So, basically, one of the biggest anti-features of Chrome from Google.

Not to speak about Brave's business model, around basic attention tokens (my attention is not available, sorry). This is incompatible with privacy. Brave is an ad company! It may be in a nice phase where ads are opt in but it may not be like that forever.

The obvious browser closest to Firefox including Tor is Tor browser, based on Firefox, provided by the Tor project itself.

You mention the two most important points about Brave that are mostly overlooked when it is suggested as an alternative to Chrome:

1) There is no ecosystem diversification, Brave is built on Chrome!

2) Brave. Is. An. Ad. Company.

The only added value that’s important is respecting users rights online and privacy. Brave is as bad as any of them, and being Eich’s new business venture doesn’t inspire any trust none what so ever.

> being Eich’s new business venture doesn’t inspire any trust none what so ever.

Why?

Tor tabs is useless without fingerprinting resistance, otherwise you still can be tracked.

Tor usage must be coupled with disabling of JavaScript. Otherwise, you will leak data regardless.

The very continued existence of Chrome is the bad thing about Google, Brave can only fix that by using the Firefox engine.

If you're using Firefox go to about:config and set media.autoplay.allow-muted to false.

Blocks all of those pesky autoplay videos!

No, that doesn't stop the videos from playing. It only mutes them. You still have the visual interference of the animation, along with unwillingly downloading massive amounts of video data.

That's not how it works at all... Firefox allows muted autoplay videos by default, but if you enable said flag it will prevent everything.

This is a default feature as of the latest version.

The default feature is to mute autoplay videos that have audio, so you need to enable this to prevent all autoplay.

I'm using the latest version and it was set to true.

I already use Thunderbird with the ProtonMail bridge and ProtonVPN on my phone and computers (combined with my self rolled VPNs).

I would welcome FireFox into the mix, they'd do quite well together -- plus maybe they can make the bridge unnecessary (which IMO is the most annoying part of ProtonMail).

I wonder if they're seeing an opportunity here to ride on other people's advertising - with so many VPN providers sponsoring content creators heavily on YouTube, maybe the public will actually know the term and understand the idea of the feature without Mozilla having to do much work.

>However the surprise announcement throws in more questions that it answers

Does anyone know what announcement they're talking about? There's no link.

What is the redacted company that might own Proton?

Tesonet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254113

The should buy DuckDuckGo.

Isn’t this what Opera already does for free?

Opera had been acquired by a Chinese company and after that the browser went full on telemetry and IIRC same privacy policy works for their "VPN" too.

Opera just got bought out by some chinese company. It's for you to choose whether that is or is not a concern for you, but I personally am uncomfortable with such a company as my VPN, particularly I can add it to the server which I already keep for miscellaneous uses.

I was skeptical about Opera's VPN, but it does seem to work. Of course, I don't count on it not logging my real IP, but still, it's a useful free service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com