How to Protect Your Browsing With Mozilla’s Free VPN for Firefox
I have no doubt that Mozilla is seriously exploring all possible ways to monetize the Firefox web browser in the future. I’m still glad the company has decided to offer a free VPN service (actually more web proxies than anything else) that gives you an easy way to “mask your IP address while protecting against third-party trackers on the Internet.” as Mozilla puts it .
Equally noteworthy, the birth of Mozilla VPN (the second offering from the company, albeit the first is free) also revives the Test Pilot program, which was previously responsible for a number of useful add-ons and features: Tab Snoozing , Side View and Firefox Color , Notes and Lockbox (and this just a few of them).
Getting started with Mozilla VPN is easy. Open your Firefox browser and go to this page , which will ask you to install the Firefox Private Network Extension. Once installed, you need to sign in to your Mozilla account to use it, or create one if you don’t already have one. Then a tiny icon is activated in the corner of the browser that you click to click on “VPN” whenever you want.
What I love about Mozilla’s service is that it doesn’t hinder your browsing performance in any way. I had great results on fast.com whether I had a “private network” or not – no slowdowns worth reporting. While the service protects your actual IP address, using Cloudflare as an intermediary service means you will most likely connect to a Warp server close to where you live. As one of the commenters describes (which I checked myself too):
“… I just tested the Firefox extension and the CF-Connecting-IP and X-Forwarded-For are set to the Cloudflare IP, so the user’s IP is hidden. CF-IPCountry contains the location of Cloudflare’s IP address.
It looks like the requests are being routed through the closest Cloudflare [1] datacenter, so the service is likely to reveal the approximate location of users through these proxy IPs. ”
You won’t be able to choose which server to use to pretend you’re browsing from another country – you won’t get around Netflix’s restrictions – but Firefox “VPN” is still a useful tool when you at least browse the Internet over public Wi-Fi connection. And if you combined that with Firefox’s new DoH feature (still in beta), you’d be sitting on a pretty high mountain of privacy. I recommend trying both, if only because they are so easy to set up to get significant benefits.
And no, Cloudflare – the middleman – doesn’t collect your data as a result of all this. As the company describes :
“When requests are sent to the Cloudflare proxy, Cloudflare will track your IP address (known as the source IP address), the IP address of the internet resource you are accessing (known as the destination IP address), source port, destination port , a timestamp and token provided by Mozilla that indicates that you are a user of the Firefox private network (collectively, “Proxy Data”). All proxy data will be deleted within 24 hours. “
“… Also, as instructed by Mozilla, Cloudflare cannot use any of the data it processes other than to improve service performance and help debug in the event of a problem.”