Mozilla Announces Experimental Partnership with ProtonVPN

(disclaimer I guess I own a company that offers VPN services, it&#x27;s like ~1% of revenue though).<p>I think this seems like a bit much. I&#x27;d love Firefox to double down on building a great browser, rather than getting into Pocket, VPN, a Phone, IOT, etc.<p>Sure, a VPN can be really helpful when you&#x27;re on sketchy open wifi, or other adversarial network conditions. But you&#x27;re still trusting someone to handle your connections reliably and fairly. Several ISPs have proven themselves to be sketchy: injecting ads, adding tracking headers, etc. But do we really expect VPN providers to not crunch the same numbers and come to the same conclusions?<p>Note that despite <i>my</i> thinking, it does fit in well with their agenda:<p>&gt; Mozilla has identified five key issues that are critical to build the open Internet we want:<p><pre><code> Privacy and Security Open Innovation Decentralization Web Literacy Digital Inclusion</code></pre>

This seems like another attempt to acquire a new revenue stream for Mozilla. I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s through something like providing a user-focused VPN as opposed to increased ads and tracking, but I still feel a bit bummed that Mozilla feels the need to do this.<p>The other day I came to the realization that Firefox is the only portal to the web that&#x27;s not affiliated with a tech giant. Microsoft has Edge, Google has Chrome, and Apple has Safari. It&#x27;s so strange that the web is such a huge, important part of our lives, and we only have four ways[1] to access it, three of which are driven by profit-seeking organizations.<p>[1] I&#x27;m not counting forks since those are largely still the same as the original code base, and none of them have gained a significant amount of traction. I&#x27;m also not counting experimental browsers since I&#x27;m not aware of any that are both largely-compatible with current web platform features and not based on a fork of one of the primary browser engines.

I have mixed feelings about this move. On one hand I like that Mozilla gets additional source of income to support their mission. Plus people will certainly benefit from using a vpn service. On the other hand though this will redirect people to a particular provider that may not necessarily meet their needs. Proton VPN offers a decent service, but not sure if the best one. I&#x27;d be much more comfortable with this if they were suggesting multiple different providers.<p>And let&#x27;s not forget that this is also a jump into the abyss of in-browser ads that may be difficult to block even with an add-on. From the screenshots it seems that FF analyzes your behavior (connection to an unprotected network) and displays the ad based on that. I fear what&#x27;s going to happen when Chrome team picks this idea (e.g. &quot;we see that you are logging into a bank X, how about you try bank Y?&quot;)

Honest question: Why not bundle Tor, instead of relying on a proprietary VPN service? It seems that Tor satisfies the advertised use case (&quot;insecure public WiFi&quot;) just as well.

Why Proton VPN and not something privacy friendly? As ProtonVPN like NordVPN is run by Tesonet is has the same issues.<p>Why does Mozilla trust in Tesonet and why should their users do?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vpnscam.com&#x2F;heres-why-you-cant-trust-nordvpn-and-protonvpn-protonmail&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vpnscam.com&#x2F;heres-why-you-cant-trust-nordvpn-and-prot...</a>

ProtonVPN is the same company as ProtonMail. The company has had a good rep, reminds me of Lavabit.

Is Mozilla <i>very</i> short on cash? Why is the supposed steward of an open internet suddenly partnering with all these proprietary services?

i would not have minded if mozilla had offered their own vpn service, trusting some third party sounds like a bad idea.

There doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to sign up for this directly. If one <i>wants to support Mozilla through this,</i> it looks like one has to be in the U.S. (or fake being in the U.S. with a free account of ProtonVPN) and hope to be picked up by random for this experiment.<p>Anyone from Mozilla or ProtonVPN reading this and can confirm that this understanding is correct?

Opera offer a built in VPN client for free. Just mentioning this.

This is a little vague on the technicals, but it sounds like you would be downloading and installing the full VPN service as if you had obtained it directly from ProtonVPN? i.e. this isn&#x27;t a browser plugin? It&#x27;d be interesting if there were some tie-ins with the browser, like perhaps separate VPN connections per container (not sure this is possible, I&#x27;m no expert).

Why is the price $10&#x2F;month when you can buy the same service directly from ProtonVPN for $8&#x2F;month?

Mozilla&#x27;s blog, so not a dupe of the other one, which is ProtonVPN&#x27;s.