Firefox’s free VPN will offer 50 gigabytes of monthly data, which is pretty generous for a browser-based VPN. A Mozilla account is required to make use of it, which isn’t a hardship (they’re free), but is a point of friction some may wish to know upfront.
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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.
They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.
They need to separate gecko properly so we can build things using just the renderer.
Install LibreWolf then disable the cookie clearing and resistFingerprinting.
Isn’t that what extensions are for? This basically already exists. It’s a shame Mozilla doesn’t utilize it for this
It depends on the country you are living in. There are plenty of people with restricted and surveilled internet.
Sure, but do you think they’re going to allow Firefox if it comes with a built-in VPN?
Texas and Florida haven’t banned it yet.
How exactly are you going to ‘disallow’ a piece of software?
The comment I replied to said: “There are plenty of people with restricted and surveilled internet”, so: through restrictions and surveillance, which is how North Korea, China and Russia mostly goes about it. Prohibiting certain pieces of software (or even algorithms) isn’t exactly something new — morally wrong, absolutely, but nothing new.
Soon to be all countries in short order, with age controls, the trojan horse.
Arguable
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.
This is exactly my worry. Usually the reason a VPN is free is because they’re selling your data on the backend. No thank you.
“Free” as you pay with your data?
~~ No, Mozilla uses Mullvad as a partner, they’re a serious and nolog VPN provider.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-search-warrant-customer-data-not-compromised ~~ EDIT: Didn’t read the article, the free VPN won’t be using Mullvad apparently.
It doesn’t seem like it, or at least there’s zero evidence I’ve seen that this is the case. As the linked OMG Ubuntu article speculates, probably the main benefit financially is making users more likely to sign up to their paid VPN.
Aside: Based on their blog post, the service seems like a proxy rather than a VPN.
with a 50GB quota, I actually believe it’s free. I use 15-20x that much on an average month.
I’m sure that’s the condition, to use your data (that they protect of course) to better improve the browser. And I’m sure they are in a country where they don’t have to show logs (that I’m sure they don’t keep, yet somehow use your data).
They need to stick with just the browser, period. Stop trying to drift into other areas. Firefox has unfortunately gotten too heavy for what it should be, and adding even more features (good or bad) doesn’t help the core performance.
The other options out there have their pluses and minuses, but if Firefox keeps pushing people will live with the negatives of the browsers that seem to care about the browsing experience of their users.
I generally agree but
They need to stick with just the browser, period. Stop trying to drift into other areas. Firefox has unfortunately gotten too heavy for what it should be, and adding even more features (good or bad) doesn’t help the core performance.
they are trying to find better ways to finance themselves than google search contracts. that’s why they are coming up with all their paid services
in which they hand it over to thier cash cow, google.
Yep!
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.
So they know it’s you all the traffic comes from?
Exactly. No thanks. Nothing is ever “free”.
If something is free then you are the product
How does that sqaure away with FOSS?
You are [building] the product?
You are either going to donate, or spread word to others, who will pick it up and donate themselves.
Money still gets made, its just less opportunistic and predatory, and more a reward from those who can afford, to fund for those who cant.
They also know it’s you when you don’t use it. I’m not sure how is it worse? Seems like a handy way to go around geoblocks.
People’s conception of what VPN actually does is skewed by shady ads. Now they hear VPN and assume it’s suppose to be this unbreakable anonymizer that somehow also secures you from some unspecified dangers.
every fucking youtuber is sponsored with those ads i hate this timeline
its better than betterhelp i guess
A VPN to me is a way to prevent my ISP from seeing I torrent and to go around geoblocks. It’s not a privacy tool at all. So yeah, I’m evaluating them from that angle.
Uhm, what? Maybe my ISP knows, but they are regulated (at least here). But VPN is a virtual direct-line to another server.
Another server that belongs to the same company as your browser, so they have an access to both ends of the direct line. If you don’t trust Mozilla to be thrustworthy vpn server (which is good, shouldn’t trust anyone), bad news, they already have an access to your whole traffic because they own your browser
But unlike the VPN server, the browser is on my end and i can make sure it doesn’t rat me out. Coincidentally, my policies.json over the years was almost the same as Waterfox’.
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.
I think it would be better to compare this offer to well-known VPN providers instead of all VPN providers, since the sketchiest ones tend to have the lowest prices. The two reputable ones I can think of, Proton and Mullvad, both cost over $5/month. But cost is only half of the picture: They’ve also earned their reputation through a lot of time, effort, audits, even government raids.
Regardless, you have some good points. Let’s take for granted that Mozilla will not attempt to share or sell user data with this free service, that it’s all above-board (a fair assumption): They still have to build their reputation from zero.
Then why are they not offering at least a low cost subscription? Why are they spending money on infrastructure and support but getting no revenue in return?
Either they are okay with losing even more money, OR they plan to enshittify.
For this and many many other reasons, it’s time to switch to a privacy fork like LibreWolf or WaterFox
Why are they spending money on infrastructure and support but getting no revenue in return?
I already addressed this in my comment. If you want me to expand on how they most definitely can make money from something like this, Mozilla:
- Gets revenue from their paid VPN service that already exists, and it would be a way to convert users to a revenue source, since the thing being taken away after the data cap is itself a VPN
- Gets donations, which more users with a good opinion of the browser will bring
- Has sponsored integrations, which pay money on a per-click basis, (e.g. AccuWeather integration where Mozilla gets paid if you click through to their website, pinned sites like Amazon that appear on the new tab page for new users) and ones that are influenced by overall number of Firefox users (e.g. Google’s deal to be the default search engine when you first install Firefox)
If this feature brings in new users, they can get revenue from any of these 3 sources, especially the sponsored listings. If this feature is just a benefit for existing users that might have already changed all their defaults and disabled sponsored content, it increases the chance of VPN conversions and donations, and increases the likelihood someone will recommend Firefox to a friend.
Either they are okay with losing even more money, OR they plan to enshittify.
Or they’re trying to get and retain users, which helps them make money from existing revenue options without having to make anything worse, while also providing a beneficial feature. I’m not saying there’s no chance they’ll enshittify, but I don’t think unconditional pessimism is the right move here.
For this and many many other reasons, it’s time to switch to a privacy fork like LibreWolf or WaterFox
I can’t speak to Waterfox myself, but I would agree with saying LibreWolf is a good idea if you care.
I just personally haven’t bothered switching since Firefox currently works fine for me, and anything they’ve done I dislike is fairly easy to just disable in settings and never see again.
Get out of here with your level headed take. The pitchforks already have been distributed and it has been decided Mozilla will sell the data asap! /s
Processed by LLMs no doubt.
I loved Mozilla for years but trust nothing from them these days.
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.
Right, this is just a proxy, isn’t it?
If it’s running inside Firefox, it can only encrypt/modify Firefox’s traffic.
Yeah, but they also added an AI feature that’s enabled by default that I never asked for.
And I normally advocate for Firefox. It’s been a good solid privacy focused browser for a while but now I’m starting to think maybe not as much.
Still better than the Chrome-alikes, but all the same I’ve switched to Librewolf. Problem is, foss mozilla teams like Librewolf are small and underfunded, and their ability to continue sanitizing and debloating the app forever is not garaunteed. A new vanguard FOSS browser project is needed, ideally one that continues the Netscape lineage of open and non-coercive web standards with a more durable and democratic organizational structure.
Ladybird alpha is schedueled for 2026. Hopefully that has a beneficial impact.
Absolutely
How is it better than something like Vivaldi
Vivaldi is Chromium, which I avoid because I consider it an advertising corporation’s attempt to erode open web standards.
Just use Mullvad then instead of this roundabout way of using Mullvad.
ofc, this is a free alternative, not a mullvad competitor
“Just use Mullvad instead” is good advice compared to almost any other option.
Unfortunate that to get this experience in Firefox, we will have to disable a built-in feature and download some extension.
idk about you, but when I use a VPN I want all the device’s traffic to go through it, not just the browser. So I’d always disable the built-in feature in that case.
This isn’t using Mullvad.
This announcement comes suspiciously close to the announcement of them including a lot more AI bullshit.
How far Firefox has fallen. This is really sad to see.
Great for newcomers, especially in restricted regions.
Interesting. I’d actually pay for an in browser VPN, it’s handy to be able to switch countries on the fly. Ideally even per browser tab.
I would not however pay for Mozilla’s mullvad thing. I don’t like mullvad since they dropped port forwarding and OpenVPN. I use proton now for that. But in the browser is a different usecase for me.
It’s just weird that it’s not possible to pay for this but only for the thing I don’t want.
The free option is limited to a certain amount of GB. Mozilla can upsell an unlimited version in the future. Likely the reason they don’t do that right from the start, is that their VPN network is completely new and it’s hard to judge the network capacity needed.
And an ai watchdog to keep you clean
Holy shit, people really lose any rationality when it comes to AI, don’t they?
Mozilla mentioned integrating AI, got flak for it, reversed gears. Everything is optional and opt-in now.
And yet, a third of comments here are crying about Big Bad Firefox AI coming to eat them at night.
