36
votes
New Firefox features: Built-in free VPN, split view, tab notes
Link information
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- Title
- More reasons to love Firefox: What's new now, and what's coming soon | The Mozilla Blog
- Authors
- Mozilla
- Word count
- 684 words
Several things I'm excited about are coming in the next few Firefox updates! Split view is probably my #1, closely followed by the VPN (depending on how good it is).
Full list from this post:
I don't see how it's economical or financially viable for them to offer 50GB of data monthly for free in a VPN without there being some kind of unsavory string attached.
Of the more reputable VPNs, many don't have free offerings. Proton has a limited offering that is free, I don't recall the various restrictions of it. TunnelBear had some conditions where you could get a certain amount of data for free if you promoted the product in various ways, but even then, they weren't offering 50GB and they were doing it on the basis of you doing work for them in return for the limited data they were giving. I'm sure there are others I'm not aware of as it's not a space I actively patrol but I've still not yet heard of any reputable offerings where you get 50GB of data free unhindered, so I just don't see how this is a viable offering. I would like to be optimistic about Firefox and Mozilla and not pessimistic, but they don't have a great track record of launching big features that they can sustain or make a meaningful difference with or that don't have some unsavory elements. One of the more recent ones being the identity erasing service they offered, Mozilla Monitor Plus, because it turned out it was backed by an illegitimate company with unethical practices. If it sounds too good to be true...
Mozilla VPN is a reskin of Mullvad. One would assume their upcoming free offering makes use of the same partnership, but they aren't explicit in the blog post.
Proton's free plan does have various restrictions, most notably for many users probably being limited to a single device and not supporting P2P, but it doesn't have data caps. The built-in Firefox one will be severely limited in comparison, proxying only your browser traffic with a 50GB cap.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/03/firefox-adding-a-free-vpn
In a perfect scenario:
A 10 gigabit connection can transfer 50 gigabytes of data in 40 seconds.
There are an average of 2,628,000 seconds in a month.
2,628,000 / 40 = 65,700
So a single server, sequentially serving users 50 gigabytes of data, could serve 65,700 users in a single month.
Math is fun.
That says nothing about the costs though. My concern is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of free options from reputable companies, which makes me think it's not a financially viable model for one reason or another. Yes there are different motives and different revenue sources for companies so one can't directly compare in that way, offering free VPN to lure people to the Firefox browser could open them up to an umbrella of other services that could get Mozilla revenue, meanwhile Mullvad may only do VPN and nothing else and wouldn't necessarily benefit in the same way for subsidizing a free VPN. So I get that there are other factors.
The thing is that VPNs are serious business when it comes to privacy, and there are a lot of less reputable VPN providers that offer free VPN usage but there's a great distrust by anyone who is privacy minded to use those because there is a decent chance that they can offer it for free because they're doing some kind of tracking, data harvesting etc. on the back end.
Then you look at some other things Mozilla dabbled in or ended recently. I mentioned Monitor Plus which was recently discontinued, but they also bought FakeSpot and then discontinued it, Pocket was recently discontinued. Mozilla, with its limited funds appropriated to Firefox, is missing the mark more than I think is acceptable.
So I think it's fair to question the viability of what they're offering when I don't see anyone else doing it that also has the reputation Firefox has to uphold. If it brings in new users and those new users allow for it to be sustainable in some way in the long term, then more power to them for pulling it off, but if they're simply just giving away 50GB of free VPN to existing users and not increasing any revenue, then I don't see it being viable.
This is great but I think you and @unkz are missing the point: math is fun.
Proton seems to offer unlimited data in their free tier. From what I understand, Vivaldi's VPN is Proton's free tier.
Yes but even that partnership makes more sense because it's Proton branded. Proton has a business model that makes offering that VPN for free possibly make sense, because it pulls people into the Proton services umbrella and possibly will get them using other Proton services and then possibly convert them to a paying customer.
If Mozilla is offering a VPN that is Proton branded, then I'll have reason not to doubt its viability. Proton has been around awhile and seems to have made a sustainable business model and is seemingly growing, so they seem to be doing things right and know what they're doing to the point they have been offering a free VPN for awhile and they continue to keep offering the free VPN and as you highlighted, even expanding the offering. Mozilla and their handling of Firefox on the other hand...
It's my understanding that a VPN server can only serve an end user at half of its rate, considering it needs to download the requested data and upload it to the user.
I mean where is this server? If you saturate a 10 gigabit egress at AWS they will bill you about $300k/month (well, you will get bulk rates at that volume but you see where I’m going with this). Now consider Firefox has about 150 million users. Let’s say 1% of users max out their quota — that’s about $6.5 million/month before bulk discounts.
I don't have much to add to this - you've outlined roughly what I was thinking. I also had a "wait, what? How...?" moment when I got to the part about the VPN being free.
I've been using Firefox for a decent while at this point, and I think this is the largest update I've seen for Firefox since they released Firefox Quantum all the way back in 2017.
Seems to be a lot of user-friendly changes! I'm a big fan of the split view and tab notes features (not sure how often I'd use it however), and looking forward to trying out the smart window. Navigation improvements in settings is always nice to see as well.
Split view is the thing I miss most from when I daily drove Zen for a few weeks. Very happy to be getting it back (assuming it has good UX).