Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I usually defend Mozilla with these things, but I'm a bit bearish on this. It's not like they're not relying on big partnerships already for their survival. I don't have a problem with free to long as there is a paid plan, which I don't see on their announcement page. I don't care who is running a free-only VPN is a huge red flag, and I am one of those people that recommends using VPN services instead of running your thing on a VPS or something.

What worries me is this will get adoption and they're start talking about profiting from it via "differential privacy"

Or, even worse for the web is a more realistic problem: Firefox is notoriously hard to manage in an enterprise fleet. Their biggest hurdle to marketshare is just that, chrome works well with windows, linux and mac a like and lends itself to management. I'm frequently fighting to be allowed to use Firefox already personally. This poses a direct threat to enterprise security policies. Anyone who bans random free vpns in their networks, now has to include Firefox to that list. And I don't need to mention how bad that is for the web given Google will effectively be the gatekeeper of the entire internet, even the tiny marketshare Mozilla has will be crushed. I wonder if in retrospect, this seemingly mundane feature would be the death-blow to the only alternative browser ecosystem.

 help



Mozilla has offered paid VPN plans for over 5 years now. This is just adding a free tier to that.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/


That's much better, but it is still a free VPN that bypasses network security measures. I can even imagine a threat actor deploying firefox for their command and control infra.

FWIW, we'll have a secure, enterprise version of Firefox available later this year.

that would be amazing, without GPO or Intune manageability it's very hard to use in those environments.

Are you aware of Chrome Enterprise, it offers nice things like logging safe browsing hits, or TLS error page events (and when users navigate through one). it helps both IT and IT security manage their environment.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: