Firefox Now Has Free VPN | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Now Has Free VPN

blog.mozilla.org

47 pointsfny14 comments

This seems like a win for user-privacy and also that potential independent revenue stream (freemium 50GB vs premium) they've been chasing since Google search became their only goose.

They should have done this years ago, but I applaud them for doing it now.

I'm not clear on why the naysayers are against this.

Gross. Browser, tracker blocking, and VPN should ALWAYS be different entities. Forever and always. Their incentives are misaligned at a fundamental level. My machine is the module that should tie the various components together how I see fit.

What company runs this VPN? One of the awful ones I assume?

This seems unfair. You can choose to enable the vpn or not. Free vpns are notoriously awful and ad ridden. Mozilla is providing a genuine high quality free vpn. Many parts of the world experience censorship and don’t have the means to purchase a real vpn. For the record I believe the upstream provider is Mullvad. I don’t always agree with Mozilla leadership but that doesn’t meant we should disparage them for trying to provide interesting features to users.

Some previous discussion ahead of the announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434567

Is their VPN provided by some other company?

Mozilla has run its own vpn for a while now

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

>Mozilla has partnered with Mullvad in order to utilize our global network of VPN servers for its own VPN application.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-partnerships-page-has-be...

(2019). Are you saying that has changed?

The T&Cs of the current VPN still say Mullvad provides the service.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription...

I wonder how do they track usage without login credentials. Can I just make a new FF profile and get another 50GB?

You have to log in with a Mozilla account.

> in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France

Another useless distraction which is only nominally privacy-focused while the core browser continues to lose market share.

They are attempting to gain market share with this. What else can they do, too many corporations only allow Chrome only, most React/Angular devs prefer Chrome and probably aren't going to switch anytime soon. Mobile browsers are stuck with their OS's core browser engine regardless of what you "download".

>Mobile browsers are stuck with their OS's core browser engine regardless of what you "download".

iOS is, but Android allows you to use your custom browser engine. There aren't many besides Firefox and that one ain't great, but it's doable.

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