Also, "free": "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold"
This is such a un-nuanced take.
In this case Firefox's route-to-market is the product. It's a distribution channel where some people who receive the free version will upgrade.
Free tiers for products where some will pay to upgrade seems like a reasonable compromise, but it does depend on how the deal is structured.
If Mullvad pays Firefox for the free users then Firefox's incentives are aligned with its users.
If Mullvad pays per conversion then it's a different story.
The other aspect is I expect it would stain the IP pool further. VPN IPs often end up on various blacklists due to abuse and introducing a wave of free users would only make it worse for paying customers.
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
> Why no free plan? "Free" services nearly always come at some cost, whether that be the time you spend watching an intro ad, the collection of your data, or by limiting the functionality of the service. We don't operate that way – at all.
From OMG Ubuntu
I agree in principle, but we interact with hundreds of companies per day. Which ones are honest and which ones are taking advantage of us? I really don't have the cycles to run it all down, and keep up with it over time. Perhaps Firefox VPN will be totally private initially and then violate privacy 2 years in? Would I ever know? Maybe? I need to err on the side of caution for a lot of these decisions because so many companies are bad actors. I'm sure I don't always err correctly, but I don't have better options.
It's still correct though. In this context Mozilla uses the firefox-users as their test and demo base. At the end is commercial benefit.
And I think the core criticism still applies. Mozilla gave up on the browser years ago, let's be honest. It may be interesting from a historic point of view to find out how, when and why, but meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on already, so ...
Now, from where this cost is going to be recouped, how seamless the integration will be (in-browser translation is useful but the UX is not good enough), or if their VPN exit points aren't flagged to death as bad IPs; will remain to be seen.
The other thing about this feature, is that it will prove interesting in France and the UK; where it could be seen as a circumvention technique of the currently in place age restriction laws. And at the very least, it will bring those topics back into discussion.
Also, "free": "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold"
> HN is "free" too. :)
Indeed: you deliver valuable information about market trends, market sentiments, technology, ... to SV startups and investors.
Additionally, Hacker News is basically a marketing expense of YC.
Y combinator absolutely profits from encouraging group think and positive attitudes about things they're involved in.
How else would you get a large part of the tech world to somehow believe that suckling on the teat of Venture capital until that elusive "exit" is the holy grail of business models?
This must apply to Firefox itself, right?
Why do you think google buys the rights to firefox's search bar (as a default setting)?
Happy to see that this solution is apparently using MASQUE, which is what iCloud Private Relay is also based on!
All of this crap that everyone keeps pulling into their browsers needs to be ripped back out and made a plugin or an extension. Stop shoving it in the core damn browser. I didn’t need the waste of space and I’m never going to touch it.
Of course the UI itself could be extracted into a plugin, but I'm not really a fan of the pattern of shipping a large feature and extract only the thin UI layer into a plugin. It felt very weird when Mozilla tried it with "multi-user containers".
VPNs are no longer optional for the current internet. This is as controversial as Firefox speaking ftp.
I mean it's very provable that they sell access to your data and your eyeballs other companies.
Edge also has some Microsoft VPN with a very small amount of bandwidth for the free tier.
I'm fine with this kind of stuff as long as people are aware it doesn't offer the same connectivity as a full paid VPN.
What's the difference when you're accessing it through a browser?
> I'm fine with this kind of stuff as long as people are aware it doesn't offer the same connectivity as a full paid VPN.
Are you talking about it not reaching out and affecting other programs, or is there a restriction within the browser?
A proxy isn't as secure as a full VPN. I had previously read a really good article on it but I hunted and hunted but couldn't find it.
This explains it well enough though:
https://www.quora.com/Is-Opera-browser-with-built-in-VPN-a-g...
However, reading the write up from Opera it's actually pretty decent tech that they've had audited by a third party and the whole nine:
Why browsing with Opera’s VPN is safer https://blogs.opera.com/security/2025/07/opera-vpn-is-safe/
Hopefully no one will start with the whole "they're Chinese owned" argument. If anybody is still on that whole trip, see this (and go watch SomeOrdinaryGamer's video on the subject) but in short it's really nothing to worry about.
Debunking misinformation about Opera’s browsers https://blogs.opera.com/security/2023/07/debunking-spyware-m...
What worries me is this will get adoption and they're start talking about profiting from it via "differential privacy"
Or, even worse for the web is a more realistic problem: Firefox is notoriously hard to manage in an enterprise fleet. Their biggest hurdle to marketshare is just that, chrome works well with windows, linux and mac a like and lends itself to management. I'm frequently fighting to be allowed to use Firefox already personally. This poses a direct threat to enterprise security policies. Anyone who bans random free vpns in their networks, now has to include Firefox to that list. And I don't need to mention how bad that is for the web given Google will effectively be the gatekeeper of the entire internet, even the tiny marketshare Mozilla has will be crushed. I wonder if in retrospect, this seemingly mundane feature would be the death-blow to the only alternative browser ecosystem.
Are you aware of Chrome Enterprise, it offers nice things like logging safe browsing hits, or TLS error page events (and when users navigate through one). it helps both IT and IT security manage their environment.
The bigger issue with browser VPNs for me is that they don't help against DPI at all. I'm in a country where the ISP fingerprints wireguard traffic and drops it - a browser VPN connecting to a known mullvad endpoint gets blocked just as fast. You need protocol-level obfuscation for that, which is a completely different problem.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
Well that doesn't seem true?
Mullvad, Proton, Private Internet Access, NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc are all VPNs. You can use them for whatever protocol you want.
Over the past year, Pornhub had to make the difficult decision to block access to users in the following American states due to Age Verification laws:
Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas
Kentucky
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Virginia
WyomingI understand that a number of people in both the US and the UK is struggling right now and may not be able to affort a VPN, but their primary need is to avoid age restriction, while a large number countries are censoring the internet for political reasons. That latter seems more important to address.
Why don't they need it? There is widespread corporate and government surveillance in those countries. Privacy is a major issue. What is your standard?
This can expose users to legal risks, but but can also add plausible deniability at the same time "it wasn't me, it was someone on VPN".
Yeah no shit, when you have browser vendors shipping features that have no place in browser, it's hardly surprising.
Why does a browser need screen sharing built in? Why does it need a vpn client?
You know there's a fucking operating system running under the browser that can run those things without worrying about how they impact on a fucking browser, right?
Is that maybe used for video calls?
Or are you telling me that chrome has a fucking video call client built in as well?
Do think your web browser also should not have SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support? What about DNS-over-HTTPS?
A vpn is a network layer tunnel. Does your browser also include its own built in ip stack? Maybe it should have its own window system.
DNS arguably would also be best left to the OS, yes.
Like Apple's iCloud Private Relay not working in China, UAE/Dubai etc. or letting Facebook and TikTok secretly track you across devices and reinstalls with their iCloud Keychain API
They WILL leak our shit to the highest bidder or the biggest stick
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-s...
Could they please stop integrating services into Firefox? Thank you.
Sadly no countries are mentioned where such VPN is really needed (due to strict internet censorship).