From 10 November, you can enable the free VPN in Firefox and browse as much as you like, for as long as you like, without needing to worry about reaching the fixed monthly limit.

‘Whether you’re heading home to see family this winter or taking a well-earned break before the year wraps up, we want you to browse with a little more peace of mind’, Mozilla’s LLM-aided blog screed insincerely enthuses.

Mozilla ran a similar promotion in June (when it also temporarily bumped the number of server locations to proxy browsing traffic through to a generous 28). On 1 February 2027, Firefox VPN snaps back to a 50GB monthly data limit.

Making use of the free VPN does require that you sign in with a Mozilla account (that only costs the price of an email address). Per-site exceptions can be set, so that visiting certain websites won’t use a VPN. It also works in private mode.

But Firefox VPN is not a regular VPN. It only masks your activity inside of the browser. To obscure connections from other apps, desktop services, and so on you need a proper VPN – Mozilla happens to sell one, Mozilla VPN.

Unlimited data means you can flip the VPN on for one of the available locations and not worry too much about what you get up to on data-heavy sites like YouTube – set and forget, ahoy (well, until you’re bored of search results in German).

  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    Just a reminder that Mozilla uses the Nazi Mullvad VPN under the hood. Of course Mozilla chose this before the leadership of Mullvad turned out to but Nazis, but eventually this money ends up in Nazi political parties.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    2 days ago

    Giving the average person a VPN + fingerprint protection is a pretty big win for privacy.

    • Nik282000@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      A VPN only kicks the can one hop away from your ISP. They can be useful for hiding some times of traffic, but most people use their internet connection to access services which require a login. There needs to be more education and less “VPNs solve everything.”

    • LiamBox@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

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

      Does Firefox sell your personal data?

      Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

      That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”

      • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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        13 hours ago

        Wow an arse technica article far less trustworthy than Firefox directly saying why they made the change and that they dont sell your personal data to advertisers.

        • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
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          12 hours ago

          Except that they do sell it and admit they had to remove this promise because some jurisdictions define “sale of data” correctly (which Mozilla claims is "too broadly).

          Mozilla freely admits that they sell your data, but supposedly anonymized.

          • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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            12 hours ago

            Link me something that explains specifically what you’re referencing. I don’t think they do and I think there is confusion between selling personal data and selling ads not based on personal data.

            • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
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              8 hours ago

              You could check the link to the article you didn’t read, but felt the need to shit on anyway.

        • khánh@lemmy.zip
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          13 hours ago

          genuine question, what’s wrong with Ars Technica? i think they’re great.

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      the biggest barrier seems to be unawareness so making them aware like this is good.

  • rbn@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    How does Mozilla ensure that you can only use that VPN in the browser? Shouldn’t it be pretty easy to extract the connection details, credentials, protocol etc. from the source code and then tunnel whatever with it?

    • scytale@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      They’re probably banking on the average free VPN user not being technical enough to bother. And if you actually know how to do that, you likely already have an existing VPN subscription.

  • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    It helps to have one another option when ISPs and three letter agencies play cat-n-mouse with my regular VPN providers. Thanks, Mozilla.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    this combined w browser based progressive apps makes jmp/sopranica usable for social media.