Firefox VPN Explained: 50GB Free, No Logging, and How it Compares to Mozilla VPN

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We have constraints because we wanted to build it in a way that was sustainable.

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Our North Star is, it's free.

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We don't sell data.

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This is rooted in our...

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Mozilla's been making a lot of big moves lately.

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And so I've been trying to understand the direction they're going.

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And so today I'm happy to introduce Ajit Farma, who's the head of Firefox, to unpack the philosophy driving their current privacy stack, the difference between Firefox VPN and Mozilla VPN, which is actually what originally inspired this interview as I made a recap of Firefox VPN.

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and I wanted to understand a bit more what their idea was behind it.

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This conversation is going to go through the overall Firefox philosophy,

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what they're prioritizing in the years to come,

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and also where Firefox VPN and other tools fit into that tech stack.

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So let's get into it.

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Today I want to welcome on Ajit from the Firefox team.

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Do you want to just start by introducing yourself

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and just filling people in on where your role is on the Mozilla team?

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Yeah, thanks for having me.

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I am the overall head of Firefox, which means I oversee product engineering design for one of the core products in Mozilla, which is our Firefox browser and a couple of other smaller adjacent things like Mozilla VPN relay, some products that we have in the privacy space.

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I have been here for about a year and a half.

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The first year I was focused purely on product management.

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So it's been about six months in this in this new role.

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Nice. And so can you kind of explain to me the philosophy? Because this has been something that's hard for me to follow as well back here. Because back in the day, you all released Relay. And now you have Firefox VPN. So I'm starting to see a bit more of an ecosystem around just the browser. So do you want to maybe expand on what the philosophy is behind the tools you're choosing to implement? And where you want them to go from here, potentially, and who you're trying to serve?

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Yeah. And I'll talk a little bit about the history as well. So right now we are focused on building the best browser. And for us, then privacy is a really big part of that value proposition that we can offer. And it's especially something that we don't think a lot of the big tech companies will offer because of just the business models and the constituents and shareholders they have to serve.

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So when we thought about what is the things that we need to enable or build in order to make a more private experience, that's where you see a lot of the features that we have prioritized and that are building.

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You can now start to see it.

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So that's things like VPN, which I think most people know about VPN.

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But then there's Firefox Relay, which is a email masking service.

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So you sign up for different sites.

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You can give it an anonymized email.

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And we actually just expanded the number of free masks that are available from five to 50.

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So anyone who uses Firefox can get 50 free email masks.

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We also are looking at other ways to help people feel more secure.

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So if you look at your password manager, we are looking at how do we integrate a product that we have called Monitor,

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which is a way to really understand if you've had any passwords breached or any of your private information on the dark web and things like that.

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and then helping users understand how to remove it.

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We also have a lot of stuff that we just have done for a long time

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that a lot of people aren't aware of.

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So we cannot see any of your browsing history.

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All that information is encrypted end-to-end,

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which is not true for any other browser.

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We do a lot of stuff that is only local,

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that is not ever synced to the cloud.

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There's a lot of stuff that is off by default

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in terms of allowing third-party trackers, third-party cookies.

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And we have different privacy modes.

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So you can go from like anywhere from a more relaxed one that makes sites more compatible to a strict kind of privacy mode that might have some compatibility issues, but it really emphasizes privacy more.

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And one thing that I have seen over the last year that I've been here is that Mozilla and Firefox, we've done a lot of things, but it's very hard for most people to understand what those things mean.

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They're very technical.

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They're behind the scenes.

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We haven't done a good job of explaining it.

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And so part of what we are prioritizing is not just building these great privacy features,

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but also how do we help explain it to users and make it much more accessible.

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So you can see one of the reasons we built Firefox VPN was actually so that you could

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have a one toggle option directly within a browser without having to download additional

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software.

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And there's like some tradeoffs, but it makes it more accessible to more people.

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And so a lot of kind of what we're doing is not just being the most private, but also

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So how do we communicate that and make it easy for people to understand why that's important and also accessible?

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Got it. Yeah, I want to touch a lot more on the Firefox VPN side of things.

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That's the biggest wildcard for me.

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And that's why I reached out and I said, hey, I want to get you guys on and really talk about this.

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I guess just to expand on this a bit more before we dive into that.

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This might be, and I don't mean this in a condescending way, but I'm a person that is using SimpleLogin for aliasing.

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I might use more dedicated tools.

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I'm more familiar with these tools.

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I like my own tools.

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And so this is more of a question to just see,

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who is your target demographic

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that's using the Firefox version of these tools?

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Is it maybe more regular users?

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Or do you expect this to also be used

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by maybe more technical people

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who have their own preferences?

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Yeah, so where I think we sit today

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is it is more of like a mass market kind of user

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who maybe doesn't want to pay for more premium tools,

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maybe doesn't want the more complicated aspects

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of installing an add-on, installing an extension.

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And so what I'd like to think is it is accessible

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and out of the box and making it great functionality,

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more powerful functionality,

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applicable and usable by more people.

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But over time, I do think that we will start to add

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more and more sophistication and functionality

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to serve even more sophisticated users.

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And so we do have things like a Relay product that's paid

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that allows unlimited masks.

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There are more features and functionality.

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But you'll see this with a lot of products like Password Managers.

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They were, at one point, a separate tool that was largely paid,

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and then now Password Managers are more accessible.

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And so I think a lot more people use Password Managers,

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which is good for everybody.

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And so I would think of it in kind of that realm of we're trying to get,

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I think important features to more people.

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Yeah, I think actually something I still get FOMO over

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because I guess technically I'm using Mulvad right now

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through the tailscale exit node integration.

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It's a whole thing, but essentially I'm using Mulvad.

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And there's one feature you guys have in Mozilla VPN,

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even though you guys are technically using Mulvad behind the scenes,

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which is your containers integration.

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So then you can have only certain containers in Firefox

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go through Mulvad and not others.

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That's cool.

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And I think that's maybe actually a really good example that I can think of how you have built like a really technical feature that no, not no, but very few mass market people will probably stumble on.

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So is that the kind of thing that you kind of imagine eventually ending up in more of your tools?

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We want more power, but how much we surface it is, I think, still something that we think a lot about.

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So as we're launching features, like we're launching some other integrations with, for instance, if somebody wants to use like an AI feature.

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And so we are going to put it in things like settings where you can put a whole local feature with you is like maximally privacy preserving.

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But then we are going to make it so it's like more abstracted and like a simpler cloud model for other people.

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And so I think with Mozilla VPN, like it is a paid service.

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And so it does have a lot more power and has all the production.

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but it comes at a cost.

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Like you have to have a separate download.

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Like there's just more for people to do.

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So I do think like a big part of what we want

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is we want choice.

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We want customizability.

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And so one thing that I am excited about

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is that there's this idea that we're thinking about

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is can you make it easy to share a link

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so someone can share their setup of Firefox

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easily to everybody else?

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And so an example is like, say, if you're like,

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you really believe in these extensions,

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this new tab experience,

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these privacy settings,

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can you just create that for yourself?

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You have a link and then you share it

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with your audience or your friends

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and then they can just download and they trust you.

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And so then this makes it again simpler

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to even get into these powerful settings.

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But that is something,

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how do we just balance power with accessibility?

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Got it. Okay, yeah, thanks for expanding.

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And now I'd love to ask more about Firefox VPN.

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And to start with, I think the biggest thing I,

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the first thing I wanted to figure out

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was if it's using Mulvad behind the scenes.

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And I found out very quickly it's not.

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And nowhere did you guys claim it was.

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I just wanted to double check.

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So do you want to maybe touch on the behind the scenes infrastructure

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and just explain the differences between Firefox VPN and Mulvad?

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Or sorry, Mozilla VPN.

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Because I know that can cause some confusion for people.

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Yeah, so with the terminology,

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I think there's a lot of debate on what does a VPN mean.

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And there is like a very like technical understanding of like this is what a VPN means.

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And that's like historical when people were using art and like enterprise security use cases and things like that is somewhere where it started.

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But then in other ways, like the term has been a little bit more genericized to say, like, I want it from more of like a privacy angle.

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And so we have products that serve both needs.

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One is Mozilla VPN and one is Firefox VPN.

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Mozilla VPN is the traditional VPN that someone who's probably more technical would understand,

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which is it is a installation that happens on your device and it is whole device protection.

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And it is managing like all the traffic that is coming from your computer.

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That is built on top of Moldod.

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And then we have our layers, as you mentioned, with containers that we're building on top of it

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and other kind of like Mozilla aspects of it.

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But then there's more functionality that comes with that.

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Like, for instance, you can do multi-hops.

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And so just to explain to people what that means is the more hops that you have, the more further you're abstracting your own current location away from any one person knowing where it is.

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If it's a single hop, then that person could theoretically know the origination and the destination.

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And someone could subpoena that person and then they could theoretically give that information up.

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So then on the Firefox VPN side, it is what was more technically a proxy.

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And so that is, you have your IP address that's on your computer.

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We partner with Fastly, which has data centers all around the world.

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We buy IP addresses.

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We provision those IP addresses.

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We then host those IP addresses on Fastly servers.

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We send the traffic to Fastly, tell them the site that you want to go to, and then it goes to the site.

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So the site itself can't tell where you're coming from.

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So from the privacy aspect, it obfuscates your location.

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And so for a lot of like the privacy preserving aspects, and what I'd say is like the more typical, like day to day use that somebody might want to turn on VPN, it's it's very simple to turn on.

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But the benefits are then you don't have this like heavyweight code that needs to get shipped with either Firefox browser or as a separate client.

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And so some of the criticism around like VPNs that are, you know, the heavier weight VPNs that are built in the browser is that you might just want a browser, but instead you're downloading all the VPN software and you're getting a lot more, you know, like heaviness of the browser and stuff like that as kind of a tradeoff.

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Whereas for us, actually, you don't have any trade-off.

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In some ways, it's actually even faster because you might get a server that's closer to the data center that the content is in.

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And so you're going back and forth at a much closer location.

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And so there are benefits.

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The reason also that this is important is that's how the costs are significantly lower for us in order to be able to give away the 50 gigabytes for free, which is a considerable amount.

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But the big reason is then there's trade-offs around,

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we're not doing any trade-offs with privacy,

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we're not selling the data,

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and this is where you see other free VPNs in order to pay for it.

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Oftentimes, they're compromising on the privacy principles,

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which is the whole reason a lot of people want a VPN.

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And so this is kind of how we found out a way

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to actually give a service that satisfies a lot of

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what people would expect from a free VPN.

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Yeah, thank you for expanding on the proxy versus VPN side of things.

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I've been leaning a lot more into these tools

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because I've always been a more hardcore

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just installing the local VPN software on my computer.

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I made a video a while ago, though,

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where I was like, well, I'm getting frustrated now

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because my banking app or my banking site

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doesn't work with my VPN or I get captured into oblivion.

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And it's a lot harder to do a website exception

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or a split tunnel for just a specific domain.

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Normally it's per piece of software

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and depending on your operating system,

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it doesn't even exist.

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If you're on macOS, split tunneling is practically non-existent.

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But when you're using an extension in your browser,

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you guys have the same feature where you just click

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and just exclude it on that site.

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And then you can have two tabs open.

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Tab number one, you're connected to the VPN or the proxy.

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And the second one, you're not.

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And I think that is one of the most powerful things

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that it unlocked for me.

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And then once I started playing with that,

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I realized the speed differences that you're talking about.

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So I started uploading, especially the upload speeds,

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for me at least, with the extension I was using

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versus the desktop client was totally different.

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So yeah.

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Yeah, I think that's like a great solution.

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Like this is where I just go back to like,

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there's two flavors.

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Like if somebody wants the full device protection

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and is willing to spend the extra,

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say five to $10 a month from a VPN service,

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then there are like great extensions

227
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and it works really well.

228
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But then there are a lot of people

229
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who don't want to pay that,

230
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that we still want to have a more private solution.

231
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And so there isn't like a one size fits all,

232
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But I'd say like, I think our VPN is more for if you're a casual user, if you're traveling, if you have like one off sites that you're trying to like access that you are not able to, it works well for that.

233
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And then we actually are seeing a lot of people now graduating into the paid VPN as well.

234
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And so that wasn't an intentional reason we created this, which I think is a side, I guess, benefit for us is that we are actually seeing people who dip their toes into it, then decide that they do understand the value of even more powerful VPN and some of those users decide to pay for it.

235
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Nice, nice.

236
00:14:45,460 --> 00:14:47,580
And yeah, I want to definitely touch on that a little bit more.

237
00:14:47,640 --> 00:14:49,060
That was going to be one of my questions later.

238
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Was this designed to be a freemium thing?

239
00:14:51,960 --> 00:14:54,140
We can touch on that maybe later on as well.

240
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We can double click on that.

241
00:14:55,560 --> 00:14:56,960
But I did want to quickly ask,

242
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because we're talking about this proxy extension thing.

243
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Did you do any market research beforehand?

244
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Because to me, this seems like an emerging trend.

245
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We have Apple with private relay.

246
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I'm assuming that's quite popular

247
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if they're still doing it years later

248
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and it's part of the main subscription.

249
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So I just want to kind of check in there.

250
00:15:16,740 --> 00:15:20,280
Do you guys see demand for this based on kind of what the competitors are doing?

251
00:15:20,900 --> 00:15:25,920
Yeah, and this is actually something that we have a longer history with.

252
00:15:25,950 --> 00:15:32,220
And so there was actually like a Firefox private network that we had launched like five plus years ago.

253
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The challenge previously is that we just couldn't get the costs to work.

254
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And so it is like very expensive.

255
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And so we tried it and there's like no way to scale it up unless it was just like a really not a compelling offering.

256
00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:59,800
And so I think that the main difference now versus in the past was actually more on the infrastructure side and the cost side, where now we can actually make the map, quote unquote, work to actually give away a free service, which we weren't able to do in the past.

257
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And I don't know if that's just because more companies are offering it.

258
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So people are doing it more.

259
00:16:04,900 --> 00:16:08,080
Apple is actually partnering with Fastly as well.

260
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And so I think maybe you might see this like infrastructure is being built out.

261
00:16:11,570 --> 00:16:13,040
So it's actually the costs go down.

262
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But I think that's at least brought us the primary change for why we're able to do it now versus several years ago.

263
00:16:19,920 --> 00:16:30,500
Got it. And then another quick question on private relay, because it's actually very well appreciated by a lot of experts because of the implementation and how it goes through two parties.

264
00:16:30,710 --> 00:16:33,940
And neither party knows where a person's coming from and where they're going.

265
00:16:34,700 --> 00:16:40,500
Do you guys implement that relay aspect of things or are you just one hop essentially for the free Firefox VPN?

266
00:16:41,280 --> 00:17:10,640
Yeah, so we are one hop right now. And primarily, you get to multiple hops, you actually it's not just about the hops, it's about who owns the hops. And so for us, like do multiple hops on a third party is easy, but then the third party actually knows the hops that you've done. And so to properly do this, you would have to actually have a network that you own. And like, so you would have to build out your data centers and your infrastructure. And then you would have to have a part that you do not own.

267
00:17:10,800 --> 00:17:34,740
And then that's where the costs get more expensive. And so for anyone who wants multi-hop, like that's Mozilla VPN is the right solution for that. And so Mozilla VPN does have the multiple hop solution. And in the same way, like Apple doesn't have private relay for free, like it is part of a paid service, because it just goes back to like, then the costs start to go up once you have to like build out your whole infrastructure as well.

268
00:17:35,020 --> 00:17:44,960
But we think there's a lot of people out there who want a lot of the benefits from having another IP address, but maybe not as concerned about all the security aspects.

269
00:17:45,420 --> 00:17:48,800
But again, I would say it definitely does matter for a lot of users.

270
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And that's why I feel like it's, I don't know if a free VPN out there that does that, could be wrong.

271
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But I think that that's where you get into more of the realm of the paid VPNs, which we offer Mozilla VPN.

272
00:18:00,320 --> 00:18:02,000
Yeah, no, I think you're right on that one.

273
00:18:02,060 --> 00:18:04,360
And I mean, Proton has their secure core servers,

274
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which is kind of their multi-hop,

275
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but that's also paywalled.

276
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So I can't think of one either.

277
00:18:09,960 --> 00:18:11,260
So it's a good point.

278
00:18:11,460 --> 00:18:12,600
And just a few more questions I have here.

279
00:18:12,630 --> 00:18:14,180
So if somebody's listening to this and they hear,

280
00:18:14,320 --> 00:18:16,040
hey, you're mentioning that it's Fastly,

281
00:18:16,080 --> 00:18:18,500
it's not actually owned by you all at Mozilla.

282
00:18:18,880 --> 00:18:20,020
How can I trust that?

283
00:18:20,140 --> 00:18:22,560
How do I know that Fastly is a trusted party?

284
00:18:22,800 --> 00:18:23,940
Can they see all my traffic?

285
00:18:24,280 --> 00:18:25,740
What does that look like behind the scenes?

286
00:18:27,260 --> 00:18:30,499
Yeah, so the thing that's really important

287
00:18:30,520 --> 00:18:33,960
is to know like what vector you're trying to protect against.

288
00:18:34,100 --> 00:18:36,100
And so nothing is ever like stored.

289
00:18:36,600 --> 00:18:40,020
So basically we look at it as like minimal data collection.

290
00:18:40,340 --> 00:18:41,820
And so it's just like enough data

291
00:18:41,940 --> 00:18:45,160
in order to like fulfill your request

292
00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:47,600
for like a website and getting that traffic back.

293
00:18:48,240 --> 00:18:50,720
As soon as that content is then provided to you,

294
00:18:50,720 --> 00:18:55,300
then it's all no longer like stored or preserved anywhere.

295
00:18:55,660 --> 00:18:59,500
And the thing is, I'd say this is like a spectrum.

296
00:18:59,860 --> 00:19:03,140
And so there is using no VPN, no using no option.

297
00:19:03,280 --> 00:19:06,720
And then anyone can see your like the site can see where you're coming from.

298
00:19:06,880 --> 00:19:08,640
Your ISP can see where you're coming from.

299
00:19:08,840 --> 00:19:12,300
Your, you know, your desktop, any software could potentially see where you're coming from.

300
00:19:12,340 --> 00:19:14,620
And so there's just more and more parties that can see it.

301
00:19:14,880 --> 00:19:18,820
Now, with a proxy, you then change.

302
00:19:18,960 --> 00:19:25,120
It is one person could see it, but now every single site that you're visiting can no longer see it like that information.

303
00:19:25,200 --> 00:19:32,080
So, again, like it is, I think, much more private than anything that you probably previously would have had.

304
00:19:32,490 --> 00:19:34,380
But there are even more private options.

305
00:19:34,690 --> 00:19:39,380
And then even, you know, you could even go to like Tor Network and things that are even more private.

306
00:19:39,540 --> 00:19:41,800
That's like encrypting everything, even from like ISPs.

307
00:19:42,200 --> 00:19:44,060
So it's definitely it's like a spectrum.

308
00:19:44,280 --> 00:19:48,080
And I know this is like hard for users, a lot of people to like understand.

309
00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:54,460
So I'd say it's good for people to educate themselves and ultimately decide on like what is the solution that's best for them.

310
00:19:54,540 --> 00:19:58,940
but I think some amount of privacy is definitely better than no privacy at all.

311
00:19:59,700 --> 00:20:00,600
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

312
00:20:00,700 --> 00:20:03,860
It's a transfer of trust rather than having to trust hundreds of sites

313
00:20:03,960 --> 00:20:05,700
with your IP address, you just trust one party.

314
00:20:06,220 --> 00:20:08,660
A lot of aliasing services kind of follow this model as well.

315
00:20:08,800 --> 00:20:12,080
People are like, well, I don't know if I trust SimpleLogin or Privacy.com

316
00:20:12,320 --> 00:20:14,760
or MySudo, it doesn't insert any service,

317
00:20:14,980 --> 00:20:17,820
but it's always the same trade-off of you're using one service

318
00:20:18,120 --> 00:20:20,880
and then you don't have to trust dozens of people.

319
00:20:21,539 --> 00:20:23,820
Are you guys struggling with that behind the scenes?

320
00:20:24,020 --> 00:20:31,640
Is it hard to communicate to users the realistic protection that they're being offered while still assuring them that they are getting real protection?

321
00:20:31,800 --> 00:20:34,200
How do you walk that line from a marketing perspective?

322
00:20:37,300 --> 00:20:43,460
I'll talk about what we see happening, but then also another aspect that I think is important that people aren't asking.

323
00:20:43,980 --> 00:21:02,500
Well, on the first side, the use case that most people have for VPNs is in a lot of ways, a lot of ways, like just simpler use cases where it's I want to have a more private browsing session for this particular session, or I want to like access content that for some reason I can't access.

324
00:21:02,740 --> 00:21:13,220
So, for example, I was traveling to France like about a month ago and I needed to access my pharmacy in order to like update a prescription.

325
00:21:14,280 --> 00:21:21,440
and this is CVS which is a big retailer in the US and it was all blocked and so for me there's no

326
00:21:21,700 --> 00:21:26,580
way that I can do anything and to me I'm like I'm not like it's just like I am trying to do something

327
00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:31,320
so what I get back from my trip it is my prescriptions available and so with the Firefox

328
00:21:31,520 --> 00:21:39,619
VPN solution it is one tap I click and then I can now fulfill my my prescription there's other things

329
00:21:39,640 --> 00:21:44,160
that come up where people talk about there's price discrimination that happens. Like if you're

330
00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:49,320
visiting a site from a location that is more expensive, like say San Francisco or New York,

331
00:21:49,820 --> 00:21:54,960
there are sites now that do price discrimination and show users more expensive prices for things,

332
00:21:55,320 --> 00:22:00,620
which is also unfair. With a VPN, a lot of these cases are where we see a lot of the adoption,

333
00:22:00,940 --> 00:22:06,119
where you can think of it as like someone kind of vaguely understands that sites are profiling them

334
00:22:06,160 --> 00:22:09,620
and tracking them and doing things that they don't want.

335
00:22:09,690 --> 00:22:11,580
And they kind of like lost agency

336
00:22:11,730 --> 00:22:13,020
for how they want to experience the internet.

337
00:22:13,270 --> 00:22:15,460
And so then they can really quickly turn on a VPN

338
00:22:15,630 --> 00:22:17,720
and they can get the experience that they want.

339
00:22:17,980 --> 00:22:19,240
And so we see a lot of these,

340
00:22:19,270 --> 00:22:22,440
what I'd say is like these maybe privacy curious,

341
00:22:23,460 --> 00:22:25,860
privacy explorers, or just, they just have a blocker

342
00:22:25,860 --> 00:22:27,800
and they need to figure out how to get through the block.

343
00:22:27,990 --> 00:22:29,360
And this is an easy way to get through it.

344
00:22:29,600 --> 00:22:33,779
And then the Mozilla VPN side is where it is much more

345
00:22:33,800 --> 00:22:40,460
if someone who's familiar with security understands surveillance tech and understands what whole

346
00:22:40,540 --> 00:22:42,020
device protection really means.

347
00:22:42,150 --> 00:22:46,380
And so I'd say it's very much a different category of solution.

348
00:22:46,860 --> 00:22:52,340
Now, going back to, I think, what users are asking, I think that a lot of times users

349
00:22:52,710 --> 00:22:56,020
just ask the question of what they see discussed.

350
00:22:56,320 --> 00:22:59,900
And maybe some things are important, maybe some things aren't important.

351
00:22:59,980 --> 00:23:04,780
But this is also where I think inspectability is really important.

352
00:23:04,950 --> 00:23:08,660
And so with our code, like with Firefox, it's all open source.

353
00:23:09,120 --> 00:23:09,940
People can see what we're doing.

354
00:23:10,330 --> 00:23:13,920
Whereas in something like, in theory, like a closed source component of a browser, like

355
00:23:14,040 --> 00:23:18,800
if you have Chrome, you're really trusting the company to say that, well, all these layers

356
00:23:18,980 --> 00:23:19,500
are closed source.

357
00:23:19,800 --> 00:23:21,180
What's actually happening in the layers?

358
00:23:21,290 --> 00:23:23,820
You don't actually know you're, again, having to trust the company.

359
00:23:24,140 --> 00:23:28,499
And so I think that that's why I think it's important for us to just be transparent on

360
00:23:28,520 --> 00:23:29,260
What does a proxy do?

361
00:23:29,360 --> 00:23:30,240
What does a VPN do?

362
00:23:30,500 --> 00:23:32,360
So ideally people can just make the decision

363
00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:33,540
of what's best for them.

364
00:23:33,840 --> 00:23:36,960
But just like information is just really critical.

365
00:23:37,700 --> 00:23:40,280
And then I think if you're like say a journalist

366
00:23:40,660 --> 00:23:42,180
in a risky country,

367
00:23:42,520 --> 00:23:45,660
I would 100% say pay the extra $5 for VPN.

368
00:23:46,080 --> 00:23:47,740
It is worth it because governments 100%

369
00:23:47,860 --> 00:23:48,660
could be targeting you.

370
00:23:49,140 --> 00:23:51,180
But if someone is like, I want to access my pharmacy,

371
00:23:51,580 --> 00:23:53,720
well, I should say for me,

372
00:23:53,980 --> 00:23:54,940
if I want to access my pharmacy,

373
00:23:55,320 --> 00:23:57,380
like I just need to change something.

374
00:23:58,080 --> 00:23:59,380
And it's a different use case.

375
00:23:59,960 --> 00:24:03,440
But again, I have both and I use both depending upon the use case.

376
00:24:04,420 --> 00:24:04,480
Cool.

377
00:24:04,700 --> 00:24:06,200
Yeah, no, I think it's a good way to put it.

378
00:24:06,300 --> 00:24:09,460
Different threat models, different use cases, different devices, different situations.

379
00:24:09,860 --> 00:24:11,900
You mentioned kind of the safety.

380
00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:15,800
You know, if someone's curious what they are trusting you with, like what's kind of the logging policy?

381
00:24:15,980 --> 00:24:21,240
I think I did see in the blog that it connects like success and failures of the connection.

382
00:24:21,560 --> 00:24:24,820
But I know a lot of people want to ask about the logging policy of VPNs.

383
00:24:24,940 --> 00:24:26,660
And so what does Firefox VPN look like?

384
00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:34,140
The main thing is that we have a 50 gigabyte limit and that refreshes every month at the start of the month.

385
00:24:34,300 --> 00:24:39,540
And so we're not like recording any of your site data, any data that you visit.

386
00:24:39,820 --> 00:24:42,720
So we can't definitely sell it because we don't record any of it.

387
00:24:42,720 --> 00:24:43,620
We don't sell it to anyone.

388
00:24:43,940 --> 00:24:44,960
No one can access that data.

389
00:24:45,340 --> 00:24:46,120
It's completely private.

390
00:24:46,340 --> 00:24:53,440
But we do meter how much usage a person has in order to control like access and abuse.

391
00:24:53,740 --> 00:24:58,480
And so that's basically what we log is just for the metering purpose.

392
00:24:59,720 --> 00:24:59,920
Very cool.

393
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:04,360
And then back when I tested it, I think it was like the day you all released it.

394
00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:10,880
There was no way for me to even see visually inside of the extension which location I was actually connected to.

395
00:25:11,700 --> 00:25:12,980
Is that something you plan to keep that way?

396
00:25:12,980 --> 00:25:14,240
Has it already been changed?

397
00:25:14,460 --> 00:25:15,780
It might have already changed if it did.

398
00:25:16,060 --> 00:25:17,380
Like, what's your long term plan for that?

399
00:25:17,620 --> 00:25:23,260
So you might see it on Nightly if you're on Nightly, which is our kind of like early beta build.

400
00:25:23,740 --> 00:25:30,300
but May 19th is when we have our next release of Firefox and with that release this functionality

401
00:25:30,410 --> 00:25:35,920
will then be available fingers crossed nothing slips no bugs but that's our current plan and then

402
00:25:36,180 --> 00:25:43,260
once we have that kind of like visibility we also are planning to allow you to change your location

403
00:25:43,540 --> 00:25:48,140
as well and so right now your location just goes back to wherever you signed up and so for me like

404
00:25:48,140 --> 00:25:53,260
I signed up in the U.S. so when I travel to France it defaults back to the U.S. in this next release

405
00:25:53,280 --> 00:25:55,500
you're going to have the ability to then pick.

406
00:25:56,140 --> 00:26:00,000
And right now we are available in five locations.

407
00:26:00,440 --> 00:26:05,960
In June, we are looking to expand to, say, another 20, 25 locations.

408
00:26:07,200 --> 00:26:12,880
And so that'll just expand the location capabilities.

409
00:26:13,520 --> 00:26:14,260
What are locations?

410
00:26:14,860 --> 00:26:18,080
If I open up Firefox and let's say I'm on Nightly and I see this right now,

411
00:26:18,350 --> 00:26:21,200
are these cities, countries, how granular does that get?

412
00:26:22,060 --> 00:26:23,020
So right now it's regions.

413
00:26:23,120 --> 00:26:25,820
we are provisioning IP addresses

414
00:26:26,620 --> 00:26:29,040
there's like again I'll go back to like it takes

415
00:26:29,050 --> 00:26:31,920
lead time it takes money it's just like a cost

416
00:26:32,200 --> 00:26:34,900
aspect to set up locations so we're trying to still see what

417
00:26:35,040 --> 00:26:37,860
people need and so there's I think two thoughts

418
00:26:38,200 --> 00:26:41,000
and obviously I would love feedback if people have

419
00:26:41,100 --> 00:26:43,920
preferences but one is that we do what's called

420
00:26:44,040 --> 00:26:46,680
like a pizza delivery test if you have an IP

421
00:26:46,960 --> 00:26:49,840
that's basically in the range that you can get a

422
00:26:49,970 --> 00:26:53,080
pizza delivered from like that location and you just

423
00:26:53,080 --> 00:26:57,040
every single place in the world with that kind of like piece of delivery test. The other thing is

424
00:26:57,080 --> 00:27:00,800
that people don't really care about that as much. And they actually want more of like the privacy.

425
00:27:00,860 --> 00:27:06,300
And so instead you do a region. And so in the US, that'd be like, you have West region,

426
00:27:06,540 --> 00:27:10,760
Central region, Mountain region, East Coast region. And so to start, we are looking more

427
00:27:10,820 --> 00:27:16,660
of like a regional, a region level. And so in some places like say Germany, it'd probably only be

428
00:27:16,740 --> 00:27:21,700
like a country level, just given the size. And so we're going to start with like, I'd say region

429
00:27:21,720 --> 00:27:29,440
slash country level. But then we are deciding whether users really want a lot more granular

430
00:27:29,530 --> 00:27:36,060
or does that matter or not? Got it. And then when this launched, did it launch available to anyone

431
00:27:36,240 --> 00:27:39,700
around the world? Is it a global feature or is it only in specific regions that people can start

432
00:27:39,940 --> 00:27:45,400
using this? So it's only in five regions. When we launched, it was in four regions, which is UK,

433
00:27:45,700 --> 00:27:47,680
France, Germany, and U.S.

434
00:27:47,820 --> 00:27:51,120
We just rolled out to Canada a couple of weeks ago,

435
00:27:51,400 --> 00:27:54,140
but we were also slowly rolling it out

436
00:27:54,320 --> 00:27:55,900
to just understand capacity and demand.

437
00:27:56,160 --> 00:27:59,420
And so we just rolled it out to 90% of people

438
00:27:59,500 --> 00:28:01,880
in those countries last Monday, actually.

439
00:28:02,200 --> 00:28:04,820
And so we're not quite at 100% yet,

440
00:28:05,080 --> 00:28:07,600
but 90% of people in those areas

441
00:28:07,800 --> 00:28:08,780
should have access to it now.

442
00:28:09,460 --> 00:28:10,160
Very nice.

443
00:28:10,260 --> 00:28:12,620
And how has the reception been?

444
00:28:12,740 --> 00:28:14,120
Is it, if you don't mind sharing,

445
00:28:14,380 --> 00:28:17,140
Is it more popular than you guys expected?

446
00:28:17,480 --> 00:28:17,720
Less?

447
00:28:17,920 --> 00:28:19,240
Like, how are people receiving it?

448
00:28:20,060 --> 00:28:21,460
So I always say, sick.

449
00:28:21,580 --> 00:28:22,600
It's always hard to tell.

450
00:28:22,670 --> 00:28:24,600
I don't know if we do a great job estimating.

451
00:28:24,770 --> 00:28:27,580
But it's definitely exceeded our internal goals and expectations,

452
00:28:28,080 --> 00:28:31,180
where there are a lot of people who are engaging it, using it.

453
00:28:31,340 --> 00:28:32,880
And it's a lot of casual users, actually.

454
00:28:33,260 --> 00:28:36,420
So I think there was a big question of, like, would lots of people hit the limit?

455
00:28:36,650 --> 00:28:37,640
Like, we wanted to give a high limit.

456
00:28:37,860 --> 00:28:43,140
But the vast majority of people who are using it are actually well under the limits.

457
00:28:43,740 --> 00:28:46,540
And so I just go back to like, I think the point is like, I think that the people who

458
00:28:46,660 --> 00:28:51,140
are more privacy conscious and security conscious and want a full feature solution are going

459
00:28:51,170 --> 00:28:51,980
to the paid solutions.

460
00:28:52,700 --> 00:28:56,740
And this is really like hitting a spot with people who want a free VPN, but they don't

461
00:28:56,820 --> 00:29:01,580
want all the negatives that happen with many free VPNs, like free VPNs showing you ads,

462
00:29:01,720 --> 00:29:06,440
free VPNs selling your data, free VPNs like paywalling you and doing like sketchy things.

463
00:29:06,760 --> 00:29:10,780
This is where I think what we really want to build our reputation on is being like a

464
00:29:10,870 --> 00:29:12,780
very trusted free VPN.

465
00:29:13,220 --> 00:29:20,200
There are some limitations that come with us being able to provide that, but none of the limitations come at the cost of a user's privacy or experience.

466
00:29:20,520 --> 00:29:24,480
They're just the amount of gigabytes, really, that we're constraining.

467
00:29:25,040 --> 00:29:29,360
I have just a couple more technical questions before I kind of want to zoom out a little bit more here.

468
00:29:29,530 --> 00:29:33,560
So first, do you guys have any plans for mobile or is this always going to be a desktop thing?

469
00:29:34,660 --> 00:29:45,540
Yes, we are actively working on it on mobile, and we are hoping to launch that, at least on Android, and hopefully iOS after, in June.

470
00:29:46,780 --> 00:29:50,840
Got it. And I assume for that, you can't just do something within the browser.

471
00:29:50,960 --> 00:29:53,100
We'd have to take up the VPN slot on the device.

472
00:29:54,400 --> 00:29:58,160
No, so we can still actually do that within the browser.

473
00:29:58,220 --> 00:30:01,940
And again, that's just the difference between a proxy and a VPN.

474
00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:08,300
And so for the full VPN, you'd have to download a separate piece of software, which is a Mozilla VPN.

475
00:30:08,910 --> 00:30:10,180
But this would be more of a proxy.

476
00:30:10,390 --> 00:30:21,860
And so you're not actually having to install additional software or having to make the Firefox client more heavy for this more lightweight obfuscation, like more private relay-like obfuscation.

477
00:30:22,520 --> 00:30:31,860
I haven't seen, and I might just not know, I haven't seen a mobile browser that's implemented a proxy on mobile within just the browser.

478
00:30:32,260 --> 00:30:35,360
except Safari, but even Brave, I think, uses Guardian,

479
00:30:35,640 --> 00:30:37,500
which goes through a third-party app.

480
00:30:38,420 --> 00:30:40,280
So do you know of anyone else doing this,

481
00:30:40,380 --> 00:30:42,240
or is that kind of a first outside of Safari?

482
00:30:44,659 --> 00:30:48,360
So I am not aware of any.

483
00:30:49,020 --> 00:30:50,000
There's a lot of browsers out there,

484
00:30:50,000 --> 00:30:51,220
so I don't want to say there's none.

485
00:30:52,440 --> 00:30:54,060
But definitely none of the major browsers.

486
00:30:54,380 --> 00:30:56,380
This isn't something that Chrome, Edge,

487
00:30:57,660 --> 00:30:59,200
or any of the new AI browsers,

488
00:30:59,500 --> 00:31:01,920
None of them offer a solution like this for sure.

489
00:31:02,540 --> 00:31:03,260
Yeah, that's pretty impressive.

490
00:31:03,430 --> 00:31:04,360
I'm pretty excited to see that.

491
00:31:04,650 --> 00:31:06,060
Again, I haven't personally used,

492
00:31:06,190 --> 00:31:07,020
outside of Safari,

493
00:31:07,260 --> 00:31:09,080
I haven't used anything on mobile that does it this way.

494
00:31:09,220 --> 00:31:10,080
So that should be fun to try.

495
00:31:10,200 --> 00:31:11,460
You kind of mentioned this earlier

496
00:31:12,240 --> 00:31:13,820
because you mentioned it's not Tor.

497
00:31:14,080 --> 00:31:16,080
There's the spectrum of,

498
00:31:16,820 --> 00:31:17,660
and I guess just to summarize

499
00:31:18,060 --> 00:31:19,180
this whole technical section,

500
00:31:20,050 --> 00:31:22,460
it seems like you have a pretty strong position right now

501
00:31:22,520 --> 00:31:23,380
with the mainstream users,

502
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:25,680
people who maybe have never even heard of a VPN

503
00:31:25,690 --> 00:31:27,080
or are curious about a VPN.

504
00:31:27,600 --> 00:31:29,020
Now they have access to this tool.

505
00:31:29,460 --> 00:31:33,860
a lot of the paid users, maybe they still have a use case for it, but they are probably using a

506
00:31:33,940 --> 00:31:37,900
better tool. But then you also mentioned Tor kind of being on the higher end of that spectrum in

507
00:31:37,960 --> 00:31:43,380
terms of safety. Correct anything I said there if you think I got something wrong. And it's like

508
00:31:43,400 --> 00:31:49,320
the one thing is like safety versus privacy. And so I think safety is, you could still have safety

509
00:31:49,560 --> 00:31:54,200
issues, but it's more just who are you worried about and like man in the middle and stuff attacks

510
00:31:54,260 --> 00:31:58,859
and things like that. So just to, what's your formal correction there? Like how would you kind

511
00:31:58,880 --> 00:32:06,340
of relay what I said. Many people have less privacy needs because say if you're like, you know,

512
00:32:06,450 --> 00:32:12,800
are you someone who's likely to be targeted by like Pegasus level, you know, like zero day,

513
00:32:13,060 --> 00:32:18,940
like exploit or not. And so when you look at things like Apple has like a more secure mode

514
00:32:19,160 --> 00:32:23,580
that you can like toggle on. But I'd say like for many people, like just the normal encryption of an

515
00:32:23,650 --> 00:32:28,099
Apple device works. But for some people, like you're definitely going to want like the more

516
00:32:28,100 --> 00:32:32,220
secure version. Whereas I think VPNs are a little bit more on the privacy side.

517
00:32:32,680 --> 00:32:36,060
If someone has access, if you're

518
00:32:36,270 --> 00:32:40,140
a government that has access to every ISP out there, it's very little you can do

519
00:32:40,170 --> 00:32:43,880
unless you're on a tour network. If you're multi-hop or multiple-hop,

520
00:32:44,410 --> 00:32:48,140
your ISP is still going to see your traffic. And so it just really

521
00:32:48,280 --> 00:32:52,160
depends on what is this particular vulnerability that you might be worried about

522
00:32:52,350 --> 00:32:54,380
and then what's the technical solution to match that.

523
00:32:55,080 --> 00:32:58,000
Just to be more direct, maybe the technical users will appreciate this.

524
00:32:58,760 --> 00:33:00,460
Reading between the lines of what you're saying is what you're saying

525
00:33:00,520 --> 00:33:04,340
that you don't see VPNs anymore as the security tool that they're commonly marketed as

526
00:33:04,500 --> 00:33:07,060
where they add encryption on public Wi-Fi networks

527
00:33:07,340 --> 00:33:09,380
and you're saying the real use case for most people

528
00:33:09,920 --> 00:33:13,080
is the fact they hide your IP address from most websites that you're accessing.

529
00:33:14,100 --> 00:33:17,460
I guess that goes into the question I was getting into, which is Tor.

530
00:33:18,059 --> 00:33:22,080
Brave has their Tor integration that you can do an incognito window with Tor.

531
00:33:22,720 --> 00:33:31,960
They say on their own site it's not as anonymous as the official Tor browser because Tor browser adds the anonymity benefits with the browser itself on top of the network.

532
00:33:32,240 --> 00:33:37,000
But is that something you guys have at all considered? Is that out of scope for what you think Firefox provides?

533
00:33:37,460 --> 00:33:41,460
Or is that something that you think is the Tor project's job since they're also based on Firefox?

534
00:33:42,420 --> 00:33:48,080
Yeah, so right now we've been mostly deferring to something like the Tor project, which, as you mentioned, is built on top of Firefox.

535
00:33:48,800 --> 00:33:52,820
We're not actively looking at that level of encryption.

536
00:33:53,560 --> 00:33:57,860
But the thing is, like I said, I'm very happy that projects like that exist

537
00:33:58,040 --> 00:34:00,860
because it makes sure that there's options for people.

538
00:34:01,100 --> 00:34:02,320
And one big thing is choice.

539
00:34:02,740 --> 00:34:04,020
And so I think choice matters.

540
00:34:04,180 --> 00:34:08,500
And ultimately, the market decides what actually is relevant or not.

541
00:34:08,679 --> 00:34:11,659
And we'll see what the future holds, but nothing actively being developed right now.

542
00:34:12,020 --> 00:34:12,139
Cool.

543
00:34:12,540 --> 00:34:14,360
Yeah, and I guess to zoom out a little bit here.

544
00:34:14,620 --> 00:34:17,240
Earlier, I did want to ask this, which is kind of,

545
00:34:17,310 --> 00:34:20,919
I like to try to think about what organizations are thinking about

546
00:34:20,970 --> 00:34:21,980
when they release new products.

547
00:34:22,129 --> 00:34:25,639
And so even in my first look review, my speculation is that,

548
00:34:26,020 --> 00:34:29,440
yes, Firefox VPN is by itself a standalone product.

549
00:34:29,800 --> 00:34:32,960
50 gigabytes is probably a lot for the average user maybe,

550
00:34:33,460 --> 00:34:35,340
unless maybe they're streaming a lot of stuff on YouTube

551
00:34:35,620 --> 00:34:36,940
or Disney Plus or whatever.

552
00:34:37,050 --> 00:34:39,399
But do you think Firefox VPN even works with streaming services

553
00:34:39,530 --> 00:34:41,220
or do you think they block that pretty quickly?

554
00:34:41,620 --> 00:34:42,740
I guess we'll find out.

555
00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:47,820
Obviously, I mean, it's like a whack-a-mole kind of thing.

556
00:34:47,820 --> 00:34:54,540
And I don't think that we are going to, you know, do residential proxies and things like that in order to like really get it.

557
00:34:54,639 --> 00:34:58,020
But again, it comes down to it's very expensive to want residential proxies.

558
00:34:58,920 --> 00:35:02,400
And so we're not we're not specifically targeting that use case.

559
00:35:02,660 --> 00:35:07,860
But yes, there's a period of time you're under the radar and things may work that may not work in the future.

560
00:35:09,200 --> 00:35:15,240
And so with that, I kind of assumed that this could be a nice funnel to MOLVAT VPN.

561
00:35:15,890 --> 00:35:17,520
And I speculated, I didn't actually do it.

562
00:35:17,590 --> 00:35:19,160
I wasn't going to just spam 50 gigabytes.

563
00:35:19,500 --> 00:35:23,940
So if your bills weren't as high, you have me to thank for that.

564
00:35:24,420 --> 00:35:30,100
But when someone hits 50 in Firefox VPN, does it prompt them to upgrade to Mozilla VPN?

565
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:32,840
Or does it just cap them out and that's it?

566
00:35:33,540 --> 00:35:34,880
And then you said that wasn't the intention.

567
00:35:35,150 --> 00:35:37,480
So what was the original intention behind this?

568
00:35:38,340 --> 00:35:49,280
Yeah, so right now we don't really have a lot of the upgrade flows built, but we do think it's not a great experience because if you are a heavy user, you don't want to be like forced and not have an option.

569
00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:54,100
And so we will start to build out those like upgrade flows to make it a little bit more seamless.

570
00:35:54,600 --> 00:36:13,140
But the genesis of this is what can we build within Firefox that we think is good for users and good for an open internet and just like the values that we believe in, which comes from like our open source and like developer roots that we don't think competitors are likely going to copy.

571
00:36:13,540 --> 00:36:16,380
And so the reality is like a lot of features that we can do.

572
00:36:16,380 --> 00:36:17,320
Like we did vertical tabs.

573
00:36:17,640 --> 00:36:20,580
We launched it probably a year before Chrome launched it.

574
00:36:21,040 --> 00:36:22,440
But now Chrome has vertical tabs.

575
00:36:22,920 --> 00:36:27,760
And so it's like, well, it's hard for a lot of features because companies have thousands of engineers.

576
00:36:27,970 --> 00:36:31,360
And so it's easy for them to say, oh, this seems to be a good feature that Firefox built.

577
00:36:31,630 --> 00:36:32,240
We'll copy it.

578
00:36:32,580 --> 00:36:50,880
But with something like VPN, there is a privacy aspect that many of the other browser builders are not incentivized to follow the path on because of the impact that it has on the 99% of the revenue that the company otherwise makes.

579
00:36:51,100 --> 00:36:56,020
For us, like we are a organization that's owned by a nonprofit.

580
00:36:57,000 --> 00:36:58,260
We're owned by a nonprofit foundation.

581
00:36:58,910 --> 00:37:02,640
And so a lot of times what we talk about is it's not maximizing for profit.

582
00:37:02,770 --> 00:37:07,600
We do like look at what is our double bottom line, which means that we are looking at like, what is the societal benefit?

583
00:37:07,760 --> 00:37:12,060
What is the benefit to humanity and not just like maximizing for profits?

584
00:37:12,290 --> 00:37:16,140
And so that allows us to pursue things like a free VPN.

585
00:37:16,220 --> 00:37:24,620
And it's kind of a genesis, like really pushing ourselves to say, like, what are things that we can build that aren't easily copied and can be more differentiated?

586
00:37:26,200 --> 00:37:31,240
Yeah, and I guess, you know, something you might stumble on, especially if someone's kind of new to Mozilla, new to Firefox.

587
00:37:32,020 --> 00:37:36,280
And you mentioned this already in the interview, there's a really negative association with free VPNs.

588
00:37:36,520 --> 00:37:40,120
You know, if it's free or the product is what is commonly said online.

589
00:37:40,320 --> 00:37:49,420
So how are you positioning yourself and what is different about you all to make your free service more trustworthy than a typical free service?

590
00:37:49,480 --> 00:37:56,420
Like what's the actual mechanism that changes why one might not be trusted and why you guys are maybe a better option?

591
00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:03,580
Yeah, I think the main thing is looking at what is the motivation for the company and why does a company or organization exist?

592
00:38:03,640 --> 00:38:13,060
If it is a private organization that's owned by shareholders, well, I would make the case that that organization exists to maximize value for the shareholders.

593
00:38:13,500 --> 00:38:17,660
And an easy way to maximize value is you sell data.

594
00:38:18,320 --> 00:38:21,560
And this is like kind of like what is very common on the Internet.

595
00:38:21,650 --> 00:38:22,980
You build a service. It's a free service.

596
00:38:23,660 --> 00:38:26,540
And then what you're selling is you're selling attention, you're selling data.

597
00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:32,240
And so that is a rightful expectation that people have grown.

598
00:38:33,040 --> 00:38:36,400
For Firefox, though, it never really started as a corporation.

599
00:38:36,580 --> 00:38:41,400
It started as an open source product that happened to figure out a way to make money through default.

600
00:38:42,160 --> 00:38:45,220
But ultimately, that's not the governance structure that motivates us.

601
00:38:45,380 --> 00:38:51,020
There is no shareholder or publicly traded stock price that says, OK, in a year from now, we're going to have to sell this data.

602
00:38:51,500 --> 00:38:53,900
Or three years from now, we're going to have to change our principles.

603
00:38:54,220 --> 00:38:55,620
But that's usually why things change.

604
00:38:55,620 --> 00:38:58,360
It's not because someone set out on day one to do it.

605
00:38:58,440 --> 00:39:02,460
It's over time, like just things change and you compromise user experience and you compromise things.

606
00:39:02,660 --> 00:39:30,780
And so one is we don't have like that North store or North store is creating the best browser. The other aspect is that the reason that we have constraints is because we wanted to build it in a way that was sustainable. And so if we had built things like device protection, unlimited gigabytes, unlimited hops, then the cost would become unsustainable for us. And so then it would be, okay, someone would come and say, why are you offering service for free? It costs you more money. And then you have to say, okay, let's take this data.

607
00:39:31,360 --> 00:39:36,360
And so part of like the, you know, constraints are a good thing is our cost was a constraint.

608
00:39:36,410 --> 00:39:39,920
And so we built a product that actually said that our North Star is it's free.

609
00:39:40,240 --> 00:39:40,880
We don't sell data.

610
00:39:41,190 --> 00:39:46,480
This is rooted in our our publicly, you know, made statements around our manifesto on our

611
00:39:46,610 --> 00:39:47,760
terms that we will not sell data.

612
00:39:47,770 --> 00:39:48,740
We will not know data.

613
00:39:48,750 --> 00:39:50,660
We will not like know what our user is doing.

614
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:55,480
And then that just informed, well, this is what we can give is we can give 50 gigabytes,

615
00:39:56,160 --> 00:39:58,220
but we can do it in a way that conforms to our values.

616
00:39:59,720 --> 00:40:00,500
Yeah, there's kind of no winning.

617
00:40:00,660 --> 00:40:04,300
I mean, I see it in the comments as well, because you have the 50 gig restriction.

618
00:40:04,620 --> 00:40:07,020
I see comments of like, oh, this is ridiculous.

619
00:40:07,220 --> 00:40:08,560
Like, how dare they not make this unlimited?

620
00:40:08,840 --> 00:40:12,420
But if you did make it unlimited, I would probably see the same number of comments the other direction,

621
00:40:12,640 --> 00:40:15,260
which is like, oh, this seems too good to be true.

622
00:40:15,380 --> 00:40:17,560
And when it's too good to be true, then it probably is.

623
00:40:17,620 --> 00:40:18,900
And so we can't trust this at all.

624
00:40:18,980 --> 00:40:22,560
And so it's an interesting line to tell.

625
00:40:23,020 --> 00:40:25,400
Do you, so the 50 gig thing is really impressive.

626
00:40:25,800 --> 00:40:30,500
I mean, you guys sent an email as kind of a preview

627
00:40:30,550 --> 00:40:31,460
that you were getting this ready.

628
00:40:32,160 --> 00:40:35,540
And when I read that, I almost thought it was a typo at first.

629
00:40:35,650 --> 00:40:37,040
And you meant to say 5.0,

630
00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:39,720
because I think that's what Edge has in there.

631
00:40:39,720 --> 00:40:40,380
Yeah, that's right.

632
00:40:40,380 --> 00:40:41,360
If I'm not mistaken, it's 5.

633
00:40:41,920 --> 00:40:43,980
So I thought maybe that was supposed to be an Edge competitor.

634
00:40:44,180 --> 00:40:47,120
But there's nothing that's 50 that isn't just a completely free,

635
00:40:47,760 --> 00:40:49,440
but capped in a different way kind of service.

636
00:40:49,660 --> 00:40:51,080
So Proton has their free plan.

637
00:40:51,900 --> 00:40:53,920
But it's quite restricted in some ways as well.

638
00:40:54,040 --> 00:40:55,680
It's still freemium, I'd say.

639
00:40:55,760 --> 00:41:02,740
just not in bandwidth. So is that 50 a hard limit that is kind of what you always expect that to be

640
00:41:02,860 --> 00:41:09,160
like? Do you plan to expand that over time if the funds obviously allow it? And I guess kind of the

641
00:41:09,320 --> 00:41:15,000
final question is, is the upgrade always to Mozilla VPN? Or is there a world where there's like a $1

642
00:41:15,340 --> 00:41:21,099
upgrade just for Firefox VPN? We are thinking through like, are there things people can do

643
00:41:21,140 --> 00:41:23,100
in order to like expand the limit.

644
00:41:23,480 --> 00:41:25,060
And so an example is like,

645
00:41:25,520 --> 00:41:27,080
say you set Firefox to default.

646
00:41:27,740 --> 00:41:29,440
Do we give you like additional gigabytes

647
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:31,900
if you have a certain amount of usage?

648
00:41:31,970 --> 00:41:33,840
And so I'd say like first it is,

649
00:41:33,890 --> 00:41:35,000
can we do those kinds of things?

650
00:41:35,380 --> 00:41:39,500
Then we are not looking at like the dollar

651
00:41:39,740 --> 00:41:42,620
kind of like extended within Firefox VPN,

652
00:41:42,980 --> 00:41:45,000
mainly because we have the Mozilla VPN

653
00:41:45,230 --> 00:41:47,220
and we just don't want it to get more confusing on.

654
00:41:47,340 --> 00:41:49,180
There's now three different services out there.

655
00:41:49,310 --> 00:41:51,080
I think depending upon how it looks like

656
00:41:51,100 --> 00:41:56,640
tie the two in together and so like kind of example is if you upgrade you are automatically like it

657
00:41:56,760 --> 00:42:02,100
install like a browser extension and we because you can't theoretically install like a browser

658
00:42:02,320 --> 00:42:07,240
extension but do you install that automatically and then do you flip like the free vpn into like

659
00:42:07,320 --> 00:42:11,100
just a mozilla vpn kind of like offering that's integrated well into the browser so it's less

660
00:42:11,230 --> 00:42:16,720
two products sitting side by side but as of now like our focus is really uh still on how do we

661
00:42:16,740 --> 00:42:21,040
improve the functionality of the free product as much as possible. So things like the location

662
00:42:21,220 --> 00:42:25,660
selection is one that we're launching, but it's also things like how do you exclude or include

663
00:42:25,880 --> 00:42:30,100
sites by default? How do you say you want to automatically turn it on if you're on like a

664
00:42:30,520 --> 00:42:35,880
public Wi-Fi? Things like that is still our initial focus is how do we just keep on improving the

665
00:42:36,640 --> 00:42:41,080
base free use case. Got it. And I don't know if you're able to answer this, but I figured I'd ask

666
00:42:41,100 --> 00:42:46,380
anyway. But is this a service where the more people who use it, the more sustainable and

667
00:42:46,660 --> 00:42:50,860
cheap it gets for you all? So then theoretically, you can begin to offer more bandwidth? Or is it

668
00:42:50,960 --> 00:42:55,300
the inverse relationship where the more people using it, the more of a strain it is on your

669
00:42:55,440 --> 00:43:01,100
network? It's a little complicated. But I guess the bottom line is, if more people use it, yes,

670
00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:06,480
our costs go down. But then it hits a cap at a certain point where it just doesn't get any less

671
00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:07,060
than that cap.

672
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:09,600
And so, yes, more people using this is good.

673
00:43:09,980 --> 00:43:10,880
More people use it.

674
00:43:11,360 --> 00:43:12,660
We will be able to give a better service.

675
00:43:13,140 --> 00:43:14,600
So maybe that's a simple way to say,

676
00:43:14,800 --> 00:43:15,780
yes, more people should use it.

677
00:43:16,260 --> 00:43:17,800
We'll be able to give more if more people use it.

678
00:43:18,040 --> 00:43:18,840
I have just a few more.

679
00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:21,060
Sorry, I just had a few more technical questions

680
00:43:21,220 --> 00:43:22,360
that came up as you were talking.

681
00:43:22,640 --> 00:43:23,280
So the first one is,

682
00:43:23,360 --> 00:43:24,600
what if someone's listening to this

683
00:43:24,840 --> 00:43:26,340
and they have Mozilla VPN

684
00:43:27,380 --> 00:43:29,200
and they've been a customer of Mozilla VPN

685
00:43:29,420 --> 00:43:30,520
for, let's say, one to two years.

686
00:43:30,740 --> 00:43:31,540
They really enjoy it.

687
00:43:31,980 --> 00:43:33,280
Is there a use case right now

688
00:43:33,380 --> 00:43:34,900
for Firefox VPN for that person?

689
00:43:35,260 --> 00:43:38,540
And if so, how can you use both tools so they don't clash?

690
00:43:38,840 --> 00:43:41,500
Because I know you're not supposed to have both extensions on at the same time.

691
00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:47,920
So I would say that if Mozilla VPN is something that you're finding,

692
00:43:48,060 --> 00:43:51,160
you need a lot of features, then I would say stick with Mozilla VPN.

693
00:43:51,540 --> 00:43:55,400
There's a lot of great functionality, whether it's location selection

694
00:43:55,490 --> 00:43:57,860
or more security or whole device protection.

695
00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:02,580
There's a lot of things that if you probably decided to use Mozilla VPN,

696
00:44:02,940 --> 00:44:05,140
I would assume that you value those features.

697
00:44:05,510 --> 00:44:07,180
And so I think it probably is the right case.

698
00:44:07,270 --> 00:44:10,320
I think Firefox VPN is still more for people

699
00:44:10,540 --> 00:44:14,560
who have not previously had a VPN or bought a VPN

700
00:44:14,740 --> 00:44:16,800
and they want some of the values of a VPN,

701
00:44:16,830 --> 00:44:17,880
but they don't want to pay for it.

702
00:44:18,040 --> 00:44:21,060
And so I'd say it's much more like a casual user

703
00:44:21,520 --> 00:44:23,320
or one-off use cases,

704
00:44:23,410 --> 00:44:25,080
like you're traveling or something like that.

705
00:44:25,230 --> 00:44:27,240
Then if you're very privacy conscious,

706
00:44:27,420 --> 00:44:30,020
you probably are better served with Mozilla VPN.

707
00:44:31,480 --> 00:44:31,720
Got it.

708
00:44:31,860 --> 00:44:34,780
And then maybe you can quickly touch on this.

709
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:36,960
It's a little bit technical,

710
00:44:37,240 --> 00:44:39,200
but I'm a big fan of custom DNS providers.

711
00:44:39,620 --> 00:44:41,760
I like to use NextDNS on all my devices

712
00:44:41,860 --> 00:44:42,800
and I have my own profile

713
00:44:42,940 --> 00:44:44,460
or I have all my filters set up.

714
00:44:44,680 --> 00:44:45,820
So I love that.

715
00:44:46,480 --> 00:44:51,800
But the one drawback to all proxy-based VPNs

716
00:44:51,860 --> 00:44:53,620
in the browser is that they always override

717
00:44:54,140 --> 00:44:55,960
whatever your DNS provider is in the browser.

718
00:44:56,600 --> 00:44:57,760
Can you explain why that?

719
00:44:57,840 --> 00:44:59,120
I'm genuinely curious.

720
00:44:59,400 --> 00:45:00,180
Why is that?

721
00:45:00,360 --> 00:45:01,720
And is there any way around this?

722
00:45:01,780 --> 00:45:02,960
So that's theoretically someone,

723
00:45:03,420 --> 00:45:05,280
because I think even in my first look video,

724
00:45:05,760 --> 00:45:07,860
I was having some issues using like max protection

725
00:45:08,400 --> 00:45:10,080
in Firefox with Firefox VPN

726
00:45:10,500 --> 00:45:11,600
because it seemed like there was some clash

727
00:45:11,920 --> 00:45:12,580
between Cloudflare,

728
00:45:12,940 --> 00:45:15,320
which is the default DNS over HTTPS provider

729
00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:16,860
and the VPN.

730
00:45:17,360 --> 00:45:19,580
I think that the meaning is like

731
00:45:20,020 --> 00:45:21,620
just where it goes in the stack

732
00:45:22,140 --> 00:45:24,400
and then what the extension developer

733
00:45:24,940 --> 00:45:25,980
is ultimately doing.

734
00:45:26,360 --> 00:45:28,240
So the way I think is like the Firefox VPN

735
00:45:28,240 --> 00:45:29,580
is like, say if you're using a VPN

736
00:45:29,580 --> 00:45:35,440
on your computer and then you're using a VPN in your browser and you turn Firefox again what will

737
00:45:35,560 --> 00:45:42,740
happen is your your VPN will give Firefox a different IP address and then Firefox will take

738
00:45:42,780 --> 00:45:47,300
that IP address and give it another proxy so it's almost like you're it's not that like you're getting

739
00:45:47,300 --> 00:45:53,600
an overridden but you're using multiple in succession and it's like handing it off to each

740
00:45:53,640 --> 00:45:58,620
other and so then it just again goes back to like what is the purpose of what you're trying to do

741
00:45:58,640 --> 00:46:01,940
Like, are you trying to like obfuscate what part of the value?

742
00:46:02,180 --> 00:46:09,640
But in theory, you do get the benefits of doing both because then in our case, Fastly won't know where you're coming from.

743
00:46:09,700 --> 00:46:11,820
They won't know your ISP IP address.

744
00:46:12,200 --> 00:46:15,760
They would know just IP address or whatever is coming from your other VPN.

745
00:46:16,140 --> 00:46:20,000
So it's almost like you're going from one spot to another spot to another spot to another spot.

746
00:46:20,420 --> 00:46:22,380
It's like a pseudo multi-hop is what you're saying.

747
00:46:22,660 --> 00:46:24,060
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

748
00:46:24,540 --> 00:46:26,480
So I'm guessing there's some kind of interaction

749
00:46:26,930 --> 00:46:30,660
between how it's serving it.

750
00:46:30,750 --> 00:46:32,380
But you can kind of think it's like Firefox VPN

751
00:46:32,580 --> 00:46:34,020
is probably the last hop always

752
00:46:34,250 --> 00:46:35,540
because it's building the browser.

753
00:46:35,780 --> 00:46:37,820
For browser use cases now, of course,

754
00:46:38,290 --> 00:46:40,560
it just depends on how you're setting it up ultimately, though.

755
00:46:41,460 --> 00:46:42,340
Yeah, it's quite similar.

756
00:46:42,470 --> 00:46:44,720
Actually, this is how Mulvad does it with their browser

757
00:46:44,930 --> 00:46:45,880
because you have Mulvad VPN,

758
00:46:46,210 --> 00:46:47,300
you can use the Mulvad browser,

759
00:46:47,370 --> 00:46:49,080
and they have a Mulvad extension

760
00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:50,960
that's only in their browser.

761
00:46:51,010 --> 00:46:52,740
You can't get, I don't think you can easily get

762
00:46:52,790 --> 00:46:54,040
the Mulvad extension in other browsers.

763
00:46:54,460 --> 00:46:57,500
But then it adds a proxy on top of the regular VPN connection,

764
00:46:57,550 --> 00:46:58,860
and that's how they brand that feature.

765
00:47:00,380 --> 00:47:03,960
I've never considered that before, but yeah, it would be cool.

766
00:47:04,540 --> 00:47:07,580
I want to do more experimenting to see if there's a way to do extensions

767
00:47:07,900 --> 00:47:09,060
with a custom DNS provider,

768
00:47:09,610 --> 00:47:12,040
even though it might not be an optimal thing for privacy always.

769
00:47:12,779 --> 00:47:14,160
But it's something I love.

770
00:47:14,520 --> 00:47:16,640
Last thing, I just thought of this as you were talking.

771
00:47:16,710 --> 00:47:19,680
It came across my RSS feed, I think one or two weeks ago.

772
00:47:19,710 --> 00:47:21,740
I don't know if you're able to talk about it

773
00:47:21,750 --> 00:47:23,380
or if I totally misunderstood the article.

774
00:47:23,700 --> 00:47:32,480
It's very off topic for what we've been talking about in this interview, but I saw some indication of potentially more ad blocking coming from other browsers in the Firefox browser.

775
00:47:32,500 --> 00:47:35,520
I don't know if that's a real thing, what the nuance is there.

776
00:47:37,780 --> 00:47:40,620
Yeah, so I'm debating how much level of detail to go.

777
00:47:40,660 --> 00:47:45,580
And so we are looking at building ad blocking built into the browser.

778
00:47:45,780 --> 00:47:48,440
It is a very common extension that people want.

779
00:47:48,480 --> 00:47:55,480
There are like test harnesses that have names that we are like testing with, but this is all like testing.

780
00:47:55,880 --> 00:47:59,580
And it is it is it is like not the list that we're ultimately going with.

781
00:47:59,760 --> 00:48:02,140
But a lot of the browsers are all using things like easy list.

782
00:48:02,660 --> 00:48:06,960
There are like open source, just like how many browsers are built on top of like Chromium.

783
00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:11,760
And so you get into this whole like philosophical are using open source are using it for testing or using it like a list.

784
00:48:11,960 --> 00:48:13,860
Is it the server side list is a local list.

785
00:48:13,940 --> 00:48:21,340
But we are not using any other technology in our public release from other browsers that came up in some of the articles.

786
00:48:21,540 --> 00:48:26,640
I think there's a lot of miscommunication and information happening in the articles.

787
00:48:27,580 --> 00:48:30,860
But then you're like, do we debate it or is it just confusing?

788
00:48:31,140 --> 00:48:38,140
So the simple thing is we're not, but we are experimenting, but we will have an ad blocker that we're going to build.

789
00:48:39,160 --> 00:48:39,800
Cool. That's exciting.

790
00:48:39,880 --> 00:48:43,140
And thanks for clearing that up because I saw that and it seemed a little unconfirmed,

791
00:48:43,460 --> 00:48:48,000
especially because there's a Firefox fork that recently announced they actually are implementing.

792
00:48:49,140 --> 00:48:53,780
So it was kind of bad timing with all that news because then it makes it seem like, well, is it the downstream thing?

793
00:48:54,240 --> 00:48:55,820
So I appreciate that.

794
00:48:55,860 --> 00:48:57,100
Or upstream, not downstream.

795
00:48:57,720 --> 00:48:59,340
I don't know if I clarified anything either.

796
00:49:00,100 --> 00:49:00,680
I think you did.

797
00:49:00,740 --> 00:49:03,460
I think we spoke well enough around that.

798
00:49:03,620 --> 00:49:04,300
If you know, you know.

799
00:49:04,400 --> 00:49:07,640
If you don't, then you don't need to because you just debunked it.

800
00:49:07,740 --> 00:49:12,920
I guess just my final question for you before we head out, what can people kind of expect from you all going forward?

801
00:49:13,090 --> 00:49:16,520
I know you guys have kind of been doing a lot of crazy stuff back there.

802
00:49:16,700 --> 00:49:18,340
You've been catching me off guard, I feel like.

803
00:49:18,720 --> 00:49:20,460
Yeah, just what can people expect from you all going forward?

804
00:49:20,460 --> 00:49:21,840
It doesn't have to be products, but.

805
00:49:22,080 --> 00:49:24,900
The main push is like back to basics.

806
00:49:25,330 --> 00:49:26,440
Like, why do we exist?

807
00:49:26,620 --> 00:49:30,300
We develop Firefox because we believe a lot in the open internet.

808
00:49:30,840 --> 00:49:31,940
And we believe in developers.

809
00:49:32,110 --> 00:49:34,260
And we believe in agency and choice and control.

810
00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:41,820
And so ultimately, like this is like the values that we have as a company and it is prevalent in the features that we're building.

811
00:49:41,910 --> 00:49:47,060
But also, I think you'll see much more of us in like, how do we communicate our vision?

812
00:49:47,180 --> 00:49:55,000
And it's like podcast is an example of like, I'm really appreciative for your time because then we can just tell people more about like our values and why it matters.

813
00:49:55,600 --> 00:50:00,000
I think most people today don't actually even think of what browser they use.

814
00:50:00,150 --> 00:50:01,960
They just use whatever's in their operating system.

815
00:50:02,660 --> 00:50:16,220
And the big risk around that is going back to a lot of what we talked around around motivations is that I think you're going to get into a situation where eventually these companies are incentivized to steer everybody to an app in their app store because they can take a cut of the revenue.

816
00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:21,400
And so for us, like it is just important to preserve this open Internet.

817
00:50:21,600 --> 00:50:23,560
And I think that that's what people talk about a lot.

818
00:50:23,560 --> 00:50:24,980
It's like, why do you love the Internet?

819
00:50:25,340 --> 00:50:28,040
It's all these values that were created like 20, 30, 40 years ago.

820
00:50:28,360 --> 00:50:32,980
And they won't exist unless people are making choices that ensure that this future exists.

821
00:50:33,560 --> 00:50:35,240
And Firefox plays a big part in that.

822
00:50:36,420 --> 00:50:41,860
Got it. And then if people want to get involved with you or with Mozilla or Firefox, where would you send them?

823
00:50:43,080 --> 00:50:45,580
Yeah, so we have a lot of community forums.

824
00:50:45,860 --> 00:50:50,920
We have a site called Mozilla Connect where we have a lot of forums we can get to the community.

825
00:50:51,540 --> 00:50:52,520
But we're on everything.

826
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:54,140
We're on Reddit, LinkedIn.

827
00:50:54,680 --> 00:50:56,240
So feel free to reach out to me directly.

828
00:50:56,660 --> 00:51:00,200
And I have handles on every single site out there.

829
00:51:02,220 --> 00:51:03,860
So happy to work with anyone else.

830
00:51:04,760 --> 00:51:05,300
Got it.

831
00:51:05,340 --> 00:51:06,120
Well, thank you for your time.

832
00:51:06,980 --> 00:51:09,740
I feel like I finally got kind of all the answers I was looking for.

833
00:51:09,840 --> 00:51:11,360
So I really appreciate your time as well.

834
00:51:12,380 --> 00:51:12,620
Thank you.

835
00:51:12,760 --> 00:51:14,340
I hope that this was helpful for people too.

836
00:51:15,060 --> 00:51:16,340
It was great chatting with you. Thanks.

837
00:51:16,760 --> 00:51:19,400
I want to thank the Mozilla team for helping organize this interview

838
00:51:19,620 --> 00:51:21,060
and connecting me with the right person.

839
00:51:21,280 --> 00:51:23,160
Ajeet was wonderful to have on the podcast.

840
00:51:23,320 --> 00:51:24,440
And I want to thank you all for listening.

841
00:51:24,640 --> 00:51:26,560
And if you guys have any other guests that you want to hear from,

842
00:51:26,980 --> 00:51:27,540
definitely let me know.

843
00:51:27,700 --> 00:51:29,360
We're always open to new guest opportunities

844
00:51:29,580 --> 00:51:32,380
and we love to reach out to new people to see if there's any kind of overlap.

845
00:51:32,600 --> 00:51:33,340
Thank you all for listening.

846
00:51:33,640 --> 00:51:35,260
And if you like this podcast, you can support it

847
00:51:35,280 --> 00:51:37,260
by becoming a Techlorian down in the description.

848
00:51:38,020 --> 00:51:39,800
We'll see you next time on Techlor Talks.

849
00:52:08,920 --> 00:52:08,940
Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok