What’s the real deal with in-browser VPNs? (like Firefox Private Network beta)

VPN
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What’s the real deal with in-browser VPNs? (like Firefox Private Network beta)

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I believe in-browser VPNs/proxies are great for “casual” users, they’re completely trivial to setup as you don’t even need to download additional software or add-ons. So they’re great for the average user who doesn’t want to spend much (or any) time setting up a dedicated solution but still wants to get a fair bit of protection. Those people typically do 99% of their interaction with the internet through the browser anyways.

For power uses a dedicated VPN is of course still the way to go but there’s nothing stopping you from that.

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Isn‘t Opera now chinese owned?

I would also never trust a free VPN solution…no one wants to pay money fine but you pay with your data then.

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Good article, but worst website to try to read something. Ads take over.

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Now you can use your browser VPN through your system VPN :clown_face:

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Those people typically do 99% of their interaction with the internet through the browser anyways.

Uh… Maybe on their desktops, but not on their phones.

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My thoughts exactly, why would I pay money for this, when I could pay the same amount of money for something that covers all of my web trafficking instead of just browser-based?

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It’s sad that Mozilla so badly wants to keep out direct user cash and development influence that they are employing all these cockamamie money making scheme’s such as semi-problematic ads and semi-useful services.

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This was a smart move for Cloudflare (Mozilla’s partner for the VPN) for brand recognition. Cloudflare make most of their money through large business clients, and their free services butter up the sysadmins who make purchasing recommendations to their employers. They do the same thing with a free tier for their DDOS protection and distributed caching. Free is perfect for a baby dot dom, and that makes it more likely that Cloudflare’s industrial strength services will be purchaced if/when the company turns into a major dot com.

Cloudflare is also going to make a little money through the free 1.1.1.1/WARP+ VPN for mobile too. There’s an optional acceleration layer you can enable, and you get 10 gigs of that free per month. That’s enough for most people, but I’m sure some users will buy more.

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I don’t know if it’s related, but Opera’s VPN switches off when I navigate to the Wikipedia page for “Tiananmen Square.”

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If the VPN is provided by the same company as the browser, you’re already trusting the browser with all your history (even in incognito mode), and it would be able to alter as much as it likes. It could even alter invalid SSL certificates before displaying them. So the browser is by far the most trust-based step in the internet toolchain.

There is 0 extra information that they could collect through a VPN but not telemetry from the browser directly.

That being said yes, the fact that they’re Chniese owned, would be a huge concern for me but that’s for the entire browser not just their VPN.

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You’re joking but a few VPN services actually do offer “double VPN” where you aren’t connecting to the internet through a single server, but you’re connecting to a VPN server which in turn connects to a second, different VPN server, which connects to the internet.

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I’ve actually done a bit as the (free) Firefox Private Network isn’t blocked by Netflix but you can’t change location. So I can use the Firefox Private Network through a different VPN (I use ProtonVPN) to access Netflix in other countries.

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Yeah I’m talking about desktops here, should have clarified that.

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Did they mention how much money?

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Cloudflare is also going to make a little money through the free 1.1.1.1/WARP+ VPN for mobile too.

For a mobile service, their website sure is continuously redirecting for me. Couldn’t load it D:

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Interesting. Sounds like a Tor-like approach, by building a circuit of hosts. Didn’t know about this.

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If you’re looking for an alternative, NordVPN works well with both Netflix and Amazon Prime in my experience.

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False alarm (https://imgur.com/fQIfd6F).

By default, the “Bypass VPN for default search engines” option is enabled, which includes the English Wikipedia for some reason. I’ve disabled this option to get VPN on all sites… I hope.

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It splits up the knowledge even more. With ISP and two VPNs:

  • ISP knows your real IP address and specific location, but not what sites you’re accessing.

  • One VPN knows your real IP address, but not your specific location, and not what sites you’re accessing.

  • Other VPN doesn’t know your real IP address, doesn’t know your location, but does know what sites you’re accessing.