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Honest question: Why not bundle Tor, instead of relying on a proprietary VPN service? It seems that Tor satisfies the advertised use case ("insecure public WiFi") just as well.
Tor hides the source of your communication, and evades filtering. It does not protect the contents of your communications from eavesdropping. It's trivial to set up Tor exits to log traffic, and people do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet you'd be screaming hell if chrome would have done it.
Sure - it was a dumb move on Mozilla's part. But keep in mind that while it was pushed out into people's browsers in a stupidly-lacking-in-foresight fashion, it still required use activation before it'd do anything... I'm at least four nines sure Google have got worse privacy-eroding code in Chrome that does way worse things that flip some text upside down after you specifically activate an add-on...
This one hit me hard. And that was after I knew about it. I logged into Gmail on Chrome on my personal computer, without realizing I had been logged into Chrome itself, which then ended up mixing my personal browsing history with my work account, something I’ve tried very hard to avoid.
(disclaimer I guess I own a company that offers VPN services, it's like ~1% of revenue though). I think this seems like a bit much. I'd love Firefox to double down on building a great browser, rather than getting into Pocket, VPN, a Phone, IOT, etc. Sure, a VPN can be really helpful when you're on sketchy open wifi, or other adversarial network conditions. But you're still trusting someone to handle your connections…
1) yes,vpn providers crunch the numbers and come at a different conclusion. This is because they sell privacy before anything else. You don't gamble on the heart of your business model unless you intended to sell out your users from the begining. And there are well vetted providers run by well known individuals with a lot to lose if they sell out users.
2) It is in the interest of Mozilla's users for mozilla to diversify it's revenue source. So long at they don't forget to make features optional,I don't see the problem.
This partnership is great because both Mozilla and ProtonVPN have similar business models. Heck,it would even make a lot of sense for Mozilla to operate protonmail. Except unlike with Google and Gmail,they would charge you money and that's it. Give us what we want,to be your customers not your product!
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't a browser plugin? It'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'm no expert).
I'd prefer it if it used some kind of way to proxy traffic through WireGuard instead (which ProtonVPN does not yet support while they should if not just for performance reasons alone [1]) [1] https://www.wireguard.com/performance/
Honest question: Why not bundle Tor, instead of relying on a proprietary VPN service? It seems that Tor satisfies the advertised use case ("insecure public WiFi") just as well.
That's already happening. Tor and Firefox are working together to make Tor network the default within private browsing mode. A number of privacy-related patches from Tor have already landed in Firefox (example: Firefox now has first-party isolation). It's a slow progress, but it's on its way. If you're interested about more, the project is called Project Fusion: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fusion There was a di…
That's always the con of revenue streams, they impede Mozillas independence and ability act on behalf of users.
(disclaimer I guess I own a company that offers VPN services, it's like ~1% of revenue though). I think this seems like a bit much. I'd love Firefox to double down on building a great browser, rather than getting into Pocket, VPN, a Phone, IOT, etc. Sure, a VPN can be really helpful when you're on sketchy open wifi, or other adversarial network conditions. But you're still trusting someone to handle your connections…
Look,you're missing two very important points here. 1) yes,vpn providers crunch the numbers and come at a different conclusion. This is because they sell privacy before anything else. You don't gamble on the heart of your business model unless you intended to sell out your users from the begining. And there are well vetted providers run by well known individuals with a lot to lose if they sell out users. 2) It is in…
(disclaimer I guess I own a company that offers VPN services, it's like ~1% of revenue though). I think this seems like a bit much. I'd love Firefox to double down on building a great browser, rather than getting into Pocket, VPN, a Phone, IOT, etc. Sure, a VPN can be really helpful when you're on sketchy open wifi, or other adversarial network conditions. But you're still trusting someone to handle your connections…
This seems like another attempt to acquire a new revenue stream for Mozilla. I'm glad it'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. The other day I came to the realization that Firefox is the only portal to the web that's not affiliated with a tech giant. Microsoft has Edge, Google has Chrome, an…
Just to be a pain in the ass, I fired up elinks to type this response.
If you need a console browser with picture, JS, color, and table support, consider Browsh [2] instead: "Browsh is a fully-modern text-based browser. It renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL."
(disclaimer I guess I own a company that offers VPN services, it's like ~1% of revenue though). I think this seems like a bit much. I'd love Firefox to double down on building a great browser, rather than getting into Pocket, VPN, a Phone, IOT, etc. Sure, a VPN can be really helpful when you're on sketchy open wifi, or other adversarial network conditions. But you're still trusting someone to handle your connections…
Agreed. I switched back from Chrome to Firefox partly because Firefox had a constant reminder of a thing I don't use, Pocket, in the address bar. I don't have anything extra in Chrome that permanently shows up, just a temporary window that pops up asking me if I want to sync when I save passwords, which I'm used to dismissing.