Technology

Looking forward to seeing people complain that they got caught torrenting while the "Firefox vpn" was turned on because nobody understands how anything fucking works any more.

Great for newcomers, especially in restricted regions.

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!!

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?!

Firefox’s free VPN won’t be using Mullvad’s infra though; it’s hosted on Mozilla servers around the world (if beta testing of the feature done in late 2025 tracks).

...oh.

Please stop adding bloat to my browser. I have nothing against VPN, but it's not a fucking core feature of a web browser. Put that stuff in an extension that I can install if I want.

Usable addition, and the fact that it is only in-browser is actually a merit in some cases. Firefox gets a lot of hate but is way more privacy centric out of the box compared to Chrome. AI is only opt-in and you can literally customize the entire browser using about:config. Mozilla also maintains the only real competing web engine (not considering Apple's locked in ecosystem) and they are the reason browsers are open source these days.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

“Free” as you pay with your data?

Processed by LLMs no doubt.

I loved Mozilla for years but trust nothing from them these days.

So they know it's you all the traffic comes from?

For everyone who thinks this is just gonna be a way for them to somehow sell your data, I don't think so.

Think about it like this. You can buy a VPN plan for as little as $2 a month or less depending on the provider if you have a long-term commitment (e.g. 1-2 years). That pricing includes margin.

Firefox can essentially operate at lower prices than that, because they:

• Don't have to charge themselves an extra margin
• Have an economy of scale since they're not just one user paying for themselves, they're a company paying for thousands at a time
• Cap their per-user cost well below what most users actually use. (I used over 300 GB of data in the last 30 days just on my PC, almost all through Firefox, with even more on Firefox on my phone.)

I would bet this would probably cost Mozilla less than a dollar per user per month, and that's also assuming all those users are continuing to use the VPN service over time, maxing out their data limit, but refusing to pay for anything else after.

Meanwhile, Mozilla conveniently sells their own VPN service provided through Mullvad, which they make a profit on.

If a user cares enough to continue using the VPN because they want a VPN, they'll blow through the data limit and be more inclined than the average user to pay for Mozilla's option. (rather than going "I guess I'll only care about my privacy for 5 days out of the month")

If a user doesn't care enough to continue using the VPN because they were just trying it out, but they chose to use Firefox because it had a free VPN bundled in, which sold them on it over another browser, Mozilla just paid less than an ad would cost for a conversion.

And at the end of the day, it also just helps keep up their reputation as a browser that respects your privacy, which makes it easier to promote the browser elsewhere, in ads or otherwise.

This feels more like a marketing ploy that's likely to just save money on ad conversions for new Firefox users, and increase Mozilla VPN conversions, rather than something they're gonna use to super secretly siphon off your data and sell it to advertisers.