Fifty gigabytes a month, no credit card required, no third-party extension to install. Starting March 24, Firefox 149 will ship with a free VPN that routes browser traffic through a proxy to mask your IP address and location.

The pitch is simple: click a toggle, browse more privately. Mozilla says the service is “built from our data principles” and won’t log which sites you visit. Account data gets deleted after three months. You’ll need a free Mozilla account to use it — a minor friction point, but one that lets Mozilla meter usage and enforce the 50GB cap.

What You Don’t Get

This is not a full-device VPN. It protects traffic inside Firefox and nothing else — not your email client, not your Slack, not your torrents. For that, Mozilla sells a separate paid VPN product that covers up to five devices system-wide.

Whether the free browser version taps the same infrastructure or runs on Mozilla’s own servers remains undisclosed. Mozilla has not published technical details about the proxy infrastructure, and the launch blog post is notably light on specifics about what metadata, if any, is collected beyond the no-logging pledge.

The Business Logic

Free VPNs typically monetize through ads or data harvesting — the exact practices Mozilla is positioning against. The likelier play: a funnel. Give users a taste of IP masking inside the browser, then upsell them to the full-device paid product. At 50GB, most casual users won’t hit the ceiling. Power users will.

The rollout starts in the US, France, Germany, and the UK, with no timeline for expansion.

Browser-level privacy features are becoming table stakes. Apple baked iCloud Private Relay into Safari. Brave has had a built-in VPN for years. Mozilla arriving now isn’t early — but for Firefox’s dwindling user base, it’s overdue.

Sources