Firefox Now Has Free VPN
33 points by fny 10 hours ago | 12 comments
  • kgwxd 10 hours ago |
    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?

    • vsgherzi 9 hours ago |
      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.
  • ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago |
    Some previous discussion ahead of the announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434567
  • everdrive 9 hours ago |
    Another useless distraction which is only nominally privacy-focused while the core browser continues to lose market share.
    • b3ing 7 hours ago |
      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".
      • kbelder 6 hours ago |
        >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.

  • tetris11 8 hours ago |
    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.

  • vfclists 6 hours ago |
    Is their VPN provided by some other company?
  • m-p-3 4 hours ago |
    > in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France