17
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...
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.
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.