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I guess why not. This is an open source, rebranded Firefox and Firefox-like browsers could use some publicity. It promotes privacy and privacy can use some pub
by jraph 4y ago
I guess why not.
This is an open source, rebranded Firefox and Firefox-like browsers could use some publicity. It promotes privacy and privacy can use some publicity too. Tor too.
Mullvad seems to be honest in the fact that their business model is selling VPNs and it's nice they are saying it's not enough. They are not saying that you might not need one though.
We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing. I'd prefer these privacy features to be in upstream Firefox but I guess world is not perfect and that Firefox still relies on revenues from Google so can't be as privacy-focused as it should.
My little concern I guess is that this browser will push for their service so it's a bit like an ad for them, at least with its name. But fair enough, and at least the business model seems healthy.
With Mullvad already being a Mozilla partner for their branded VPN, all this actually look good. They seem to be spending their money on worthy stuff.
- thejosh 4y agoI quite like Mullvad. I haven't needed to use them much (mostly when my ISP has wonky routing and I need something semi-urgent), but their service is pretty good, their website feels like it's designed for the more "techy users". Their billing is the least sketchiest of VPN providers, with no ticking clocks, no upsell and other nonsense. I also like they provide a Wireguard file and a way to filter it, so it's super easy to get started.
- enlyth 4y agoI share a VPN subscription with my father, I use it for torrenting so my ISP can't snoop on me, and he uses it to bypass geo blocking to watch UK shows (things like BritBox, Netflix, BBC etc.) in another country. Unfortunately, there is no way to legally pay for most of these services and watch them from abroad. I tried to get us to use Mullvad, as it was perfect for me, but for him it was constant problems with the services he used, whereas the sketchier providers like NordVPN and ExpressVPN always worked without issues.
- highhedgehog 4y agodoes it work to bypass geoblocking of Netflix? i cannot access the us catalog from Italy for instance
- RealStickman_ 4y agoProblems with services are to be expected when using Mullvad. Their IPs are all recognised as originating from datacenters. You might be lucky, but often not. Sketchier VPN providers use "home ips" and rotate them regularly in order to defeat Netflix or other services blocking them.
- seanw444 4y agoWhy are the sketchy VPN providers capable of that, but not Mullvad?
- tempest_ 4y agoSketchier providers often use dubious methods to acquire their exit nodes. Often they pay someone to include their code in a "free" software or browser extension (or malware) that allows them to route traffic through the host. Oxylabs is one of the larger examples whose record is somewhat dubious.
- dirheist 4y agoIIRC the mylobot botnet is responsible for providing the vast majority of residential (home) IP addresses for residential VPN providers (who are then sold to expressvpn/nordvpn). The whole business is incredibly shady and nefarious and nordvpn/expressvpn must know from whom they contract their residential vpn services from. BHProxies is the largest residential proxy provider on the internet and almost all of their proxies are acquired through the botnet above. https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-botnet https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...
- 4y ago
- rurp 4y agoI want to second this and add that they make it very easy to make non-recurring payments. So many modern software companies do everything they can to hook you into an endless subscription, but Mullvad is refreshing in this regard. I only use a VPN once in a while and when I need one I just throw Mullvad a few bucks for one month plan, which they make as seamless as possible.
- yucky 4y ago[flagged]
- dymk 4y ago[flagged]
- Euphorbium 4y agoLets replace that with vpn pushing, that sure is better. By the way brave is also pushing a paid vpn.
- dymk 4y agoThere is no opt-out to not use a VPN. There's... the Mullvad logo, which seems pretty reasonable. Certainly more reasonable than injecting their own ad network into your pages and pushing your home-rolled cryptocoin.
- Euphorbium 4y agoI have been using brave for a long time, and the only places where crypto is mentioned is in the new tab window. You have to opt in to add replacement.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI believe you mean "you have to opt in to their ads, and there is no ad replacement feature", unless something has changed very recently.
- tomcam 4y ago> Eich being a homophobe Wut? Citation needed. I’m sure you don’t mean his support of Proposition 8 in 2008, because Barack Obama professed the same belief in 2008… making him, in this formulation, a homophobe.
- 4y ago
- WinstonSmith84 4y agoI use Mullvad for 2 years and yeah it's been a good VPN. Global outage have been very rare, maybe it happened 2 or 3 times altogether. It happens however that some websites are blocking Mullvad servers, usually, it's just about switching to another server to get this working. The desktop client also supports some obfuscation schemes (UDP over TCP) which is useful when you're in countries which block any kind of VPN. The default smartphone app doesn't support this out of the box, but they have some tutorials to setup Shadowsocks and OpenVPN to route the traffic over https as well
- np1810 4y ago> We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing. If you're looking such option for Android, you can check out Mull [1] which is available on F-Droid [2] as well and use it along with uBlock Origin. [1]: https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix [2]: https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/ https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/
- tetris11 4y ago"The upstream source code is not entirely Free"
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoI've asked multiple times to all the brave sympathizers about "why not fork firefox, put your shnazzy customization and call it a day. By lapping up to chromium, you are only helping Google regardless of what search engine you use" And more often than not the response has been "well we did investigate Firefox but working with it was pita so we went with easiest option" Shit dude. You want to start a business so at least do the right thing. If there are more Firefox forks, like there are chromium forks today, that would normalize Firefox because currently chromium is the de facto web standard.
- charcircuit 4y agoHow is propping up Firefox's market share and slowing down their own development the right thing to do as a business? If Firefox wants to have a competitive market share they should actively compete instead of begging people to increase their market share.
- olyjohn 4y agoI love how the 'right thing to do' is not the same as the 'right thing to do as a business.' One is actually the right thing to do. The other is how to make more money faster and quicker.
- charcircuit 4y agoThey can be aligned. Faster feature development both provides more utility to the users and attracts new users which is good for the business.
- oDot 4y ago> I guess why not. > ...Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet. https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
- seanw444 4y agoThe thing is, while Firefox should have better sandboxing, the tradeoff at the moment is that with Chromium you get better security, but less control and privacy off the bat. With Firefox, you get less security, but more control and privacy off the bat.
- dblohm7 4y agoThat is waaaay out of date on the Desktop front.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoSeems like a wash overall with how Chrome for Android lacks support for extensions entirely. Firefox for Android supports uBlock Origin, which greatly cuts down on tracking and chances to be hit by broadly-targeted malvertising.
- charcircuit 4y agoKiwi Browser is a chrome fork that supports web extentions on Android.
- jorvi 4y agoFirefox on iOS contains no built-in adblocking despite Firefox Focus doing so. More bizarrely, there’s an open Bugzilla and GitHub issue on that, both a few years old. Obviously I have transferred my entire family and social circle over to Brave. If Firefox won’t make their users secure, I will.
- 4y ago
- whoopdedo 4y agoFirefox is already an an ad for Mullvad since the Mozilla VPN is rebranded Mullvad. It would not be terrible for them to become a more prominent corporate sponsor of Mozilla. Less eyebrow-raising than Google at least.
- noobcoder 4y agoI've been a Mullvad user for a while now, and I have to say, their commitment to open source is truly impressive. They're living that philosophy by making their VPN client open source. Tor Browser with the security of a trusted VPN should be an great alternative
- navigate8310 4y ago> We need a Firefox with good defaults and it seems like this browser is such a thing. Allow me to introduce you LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- FireInsight 4y agoI'm quite surprised nobody mentioned Librewolf yet. https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/ It's a custom build of Firefox with somewhat sensible, sometimes strict, privacy respecting default settings. There's also the Arkenfox user.js which you can put on top of vanilla Firefox, aiming for the most privacy and security possible. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
- 93po 4y agoMy issue with these browsers, including Firefox with things like fingerprint resisting enabled, is that it breaks a lot of sites. Add a VPN to the mix and a lot of sites flat out refuse to let you interact with them, or they give you 5 minutes of captchas, or they require 2 factor login despite asking them to remember your device. I have to open some sites (banking, brokerage, health insurance) on a near-daily basis in Chrome with no extensions and no VPN instead of my regular firefox+vpn. A lot of sites allow interaction even with the above but they shadowban you without telling you. Craigslist shadow bans and auto-spam-filters any submissions done with a VPN, and then also auto-spam-filters any subsequent submissions on the same account even with the VPN turned off. Reddit also universally spam-filters any submissions and comments done under a VPN, and rate limits your commenting a shitload on VPNs.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoYep I tried Mullvad and it's completely unusable on a commercialised web. Maybe for some people privacy trumps usability.
- joveian 4y agoArkenfox is great, although worth noting that there are always privacy vs. security vs. usability tradeoffs. The best usability settings (in terms of sites just working at least) are generally the Firefox default and Arkenfox defaults aims for privacy mostly but they also have some of the best descriptions of available configuration available anywhere (often the only other source of any kind of information is a brief comment in the source code that assumes familiarity with Firefox code). Personally, I aim for the best security and accept that that makes me unique.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> it's nice they are saying it's not enough. Mullvad, who has a reputation in the HN comments for being just like... over the top amazing + great (they swear up and down they don't store traffic logs and if you don't trust them, you can pay anonymously somehow or whatever), is having a "hard time" being profitable/growing all while NordVPN, who has a bad reputation in HN comments for being untrustworthy and "not so anonymous", seems more well known (and therefore most likely has more paying customers and makes more money?) What is that law called in business? when the "less good" offering wins?
- dimitrios1 4y agoIt's called educating your potential customers on your product. NordVPN has spent an incredible amount of money getting their name out there. The majority of the population hasn't a clue about what a VPN is or does. The ones that do, their only interface is "its this thing my company makes me connect to" Of the remaining subset of people who are aware of what VPNs actually do for you, it's likely they can only name 1 or two brands: NordVPN and ExpressVPN. So if you have the superior product, but the lesser position in the market, then get busy marketing.
- dns_snek 4y ago> So if you have the superior product, but the lesser position in the market, then get busy marketing. Easier said than done I imagine. Big brand VPN providers charge several times more for the "same" service, or make you sign up with 3 year commitment to even come close to Mullvad's monthly pricing.
- yencabulator 4y ago> NordVPN has spent an incredible amount of money getting their name out there. I think you misspelled "spamming ads everywhere".
- dimitrios1 4y agoWhatever you want to call it, and whatever it means to you, it must be done in some way, like it or not. Or you can sit here and complain everyone's using the big name that sucks and nobody uses your superior 100% artisinally, crafted from free-range conflict-free code, ethically "superior" app.
- kulahan 4y agoTor is borderline useless for privacy. It was literally built for the government [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#History
- 1101010010 4y agoThe Tor design spec literally says it is not meant to defeat a global passive surveillance panopticon like a world government. Know its limitations and it's a fine tool. By the way, the entire Internet was built for the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet
- rOOb85 4y agoYou do realize that tor is open source and has been under scrutiny by some of the worlds leading security researchers? It may not be 100% perfect, but claiming it’s useless and ineffective simply because it was born out of government research is completely asinine.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoI use TOR to circumvent the government blocking torrent sites, ie 1337.to No it probably won't help if I want to buy fertilizer for a truck bomb.
- somishere 4y agoGreat to hear it's a FF fork. Mention of Tor made me think Brave / Chromium.
- CostcoFanboy 4y ago> We need a Firefox with good defaults So, like LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc. ? There's a ton of those already.
- jraph 4y agoThis time, there's strong marketing power though. It has a chance of being adopted by people interested in privacy but not really into computers. It matters a lot. Now, I didn't really know about LibreWolf, I'll look into it for myself.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 4y ago> They are not saying that you might not need one though. Why would they?
- jraph 4y agoUsing a VPN might have security implications (such as now, you have an additional central entity, maybe not in the same jurisdiction as you, that can list your network connections to a requesting entity), or not be an answer to your thread model. I don't really blame them for this though. Buyers should also do their homework.
- birracerveza 4y ago>My little concern I guess is that this browser will push for their service so it's a bit like an ad for them I mean... yeah? What else should it be?