# Mozilla VPN on *BSD



## nunotex (Jul 25, 2020)

Hello,

I've just received an email from Mozilla telling me a new product: Mozilla VPN.

This product is available to this OSes:

- Microsoft Windows 10 computers
- Android and Chromebook devices
- Apple iPhone and iPad devices
- Mac & Linux coming soon

No *BSD support! 

I'm very unhappy with mozilla


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## unitrunker (Jul 25, 2020)

It's based on Wireguard. It's also $5 per month. I dropped Mozilla when they bundled Pocket. To compete with Google, they've adopted Google's playbook. You are being marketed.


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## a6h (Jul 25, 2020)

Off-Topic page/thread, therefore my off-topic/opinion:

Firefox is a garbage product, produced by garbage team.
Tab crashing and high memory/CPU usage, nearly incompatible "User Profile" between OS (--allow-downgrade), stupid setting page and poor performance.
And Skype/Team situation

Mozilla/Firefox is not a technology company, it's a cesspool of activists.
_Brendan Eich case_
Everything about Brendan Eich make me sick: his look, creepy smile and his psyche, but those are completely different issues.

It's a stupid idea to let same company produce your browser, Sync your personal credentials, and at the same time be your VPN and store your _PII._
I don't buy the concept of No-Log policy from any company, unless I or someone whom I trust, implement the VPN server.
I don't trust any entity with sharp political lean (from left to right), to manage my VPN.
Far or near, left or right, from starktrek yoyo universe, ... all nonsense terms, keep pesants busy.


VPN oriented companies couldn't get it right, Mozilia could! couldn't they?
Recent No-Log VPN case: https://www[.]vpnmentor.com/blog/report-free-vpns-leak/

Anyway, I have to use firefox, I have to mange dozens of separate user profiles on different OSs. The other garbage product produced by garbage company, better know as Chrome, is incapable of do it correctly. They can mess with address bar, though.

[EDIT 1]: Correcting some of grammatical mistakes. There's more!
[EDIT 2]: Tone down my language.
[EDIT 3]: _Sharp_ is the keyword in the line no,10. People and companies have political point of view, and they should, We're not robots. But where's the limit?


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## PMc (Jul 25, 2020)

There is no limit (You have asked). Limit is a one-dimensional thing, it doesn't work in folded space.

I don't really get Your point (that is, what You're up to). Firefox does the job nicely for me, only downside is that it is too big. The real problem is, there seems no way to get a light-weight browser that works, anyway, meaning, we have steered ourselves into a monolithic dependency - and that way dropped the best of the Internet.

I don't see much use for such VPN, anyway - as that would bring things in -as I perceive- exactly the _wrong_ direction: giving traffic control to some big and intransparent external operation, instead of having it on one's own premises. The telltale is that you need to run your traffic thru such an organization to protect yourself from again other organizations - and I don't see much difference between all those organizations: they're all together NOT interested in my well-being.

The big thing with the Internet was, that it is purely anarchic: any device that is capable to access the net is automatically also capable to provide all the services on the net. This is in strict contrast to traditional media, and it should have made all those organizations superfluous. That they have established nevertheless, I can only see one reason for: that people want to be slaves.


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## zirias@ (Jul 25, 2020)

PMc said:


> The real problem is, there seems no way to get a light-weight browser that works


Depends on your definition of "works". Surely, a light-weight browser that just does the job browsers were designed for initially (which is display and navigate in hypermedia documents) is possible. It's just only a fraction of www servers delivers such content nowadays 

A "modern" browser is a full-featured portable application platform, with HTML/CSS as UI description languages. Sure, something like this can't ever be "light-weight"


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## PMc (Jul 25, 2020)

Zirias said:


> Depends on your definition of "works".



This is, as usual, very simple and practical.

See, if my router dies, then I am off the Internet - and that's a problem. So I should have some assortment of redundancy and/or spare parts to harbour no single-point-of-failure. So far, I suppose, most of us know that.

But then, if my desktop dies --- I still have Internet, only I cannot browse it with a headless router. So, this is also a single-point-of-failure. (Okay, if you have some working laptop or tablet, then you're out of that dilemma. I currently don't, and after finally moving all to amd64, I am a bit low on spare parts. I would actually need to start installing some X on the router, move the screen there, and work it while standing in the hallway - thats about as bad as using the smartphone for browsing.)



> A "modern" browser is a full-featured portable application platform, with HTML/CSS as UI description languages. Sure, something like this can't ever be "light-weight"



This is again very simple and practical. What I need to do in the mentioned case is, browse some merchants and/or ebay for the potentially needed replacement parts. And go thru the process of electronically placing and paying an order.
I very much doubt this would still be possible without a "modern" browser, specifically javascript.


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## unitrunker (Jul 26, 2020)

PMc - very true. Many websites require a "modern" browser. I presume the idea behind the VPN is to conceal your true IP address. Combine with ad-blocks and periodic flushing of all cookies - you've recovered some semblance of your privacy.


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## a6h (Jul 26, 2020)

I'm not against modern browsers. The point is, using browser and VPN, both from same company, is a bad idea.


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## zirias@ (Jul 26, 2020)

PMc said:


> This is again very simple and practical. What I need to do in the mentioned case is, browse some merchants and/or ebay for the potentially needed replacement parts. And go thru the process of electronically placing and paying an order.
> I very much doubt this would still be possible without a "modern" browser, specifically javascript.


It's not as simple as you assume. Trying a rough guess here, 80% of www content is still just hypermedia documents, which a "traditional" browser will display without problems. Of course, 80% of what you actually _use_ is web applications.

Still there are two ways how to build web applications:

Nowadays widerspread is to build them entirely in the browser (implemented in Javascript) and only have them communicate with the server when absolutely needed. In this model, the application has no resemblance any more with what the web was originally designed to be. Such an application will only be usable in a browser with all the bells and whistles.
You can also design your application on the server, making it deliver documents representing resources, possibly based on user queries (GET) and execute some functionality server-side on POST requests. This is the traditional way to build web applications, and done right, it neatly fits the hypermedia model of the web. These applications can still deliver optional stuff (like Javascript) and make their UI more "shiny" _if_ the browser used supports it. The keyword here is "progressive enhancement" -- used correctly, you'll have a UI with all the bells and whistles in a "modern" browser, while still supporting traditional browsers.
As you can imagine, if you want all the "fancy crap", this second approach is much more expensive in development. One issue is that there are tons of libraries and frameworks for the first approach, but not for the second.

Still there are companies trying to do exactly that, for example Amazon (just an example I know about, not trying to advertise here!). Of course, such applications could still have areas that won't work e.g. without Javascript, but probably, you could at least completely proceed a checkout there in a traditional browser. Sure, most shops won't work that way...


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## Lamia (Jul 26, 2020)

Mozilla needs to continue trying new projects and things to stay competitive.
Mozilla {VPN, Voice, Pocket/fileshare, etc}.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 26, 2020)

Zirias said:


> As you can imagine, if you want all the "fancy crap", this second approach is much more expensive in development.


I don't know about it being more expensive. That's the way my company did everything. As browsers got better at handling such things, we did download some content at times but only when it was convenient and necessary.


Zirias said:


> One issue is that there are tons of libraries and frameworks for the first approach, but not for the second.


I think there are for the second but I may be mis-remembering. I never used them. The funny thing about the first is, I'd bet most of the people use those libraries and frameworks because....because...well...doesn't everybody? In other words, they can't tell you why they use them other than, "Well, Facebook does!", or, "It has this fancy cool thing where every element can react to every user input and...and...and..." without realizing they don't have a need for any of that. Worse, they'll find a need for that whether they need it or not.

I'll try and find a graph someone put out showing the weight of a web page from plain HTML/CSS/JS through Angular. There were something like 30 comparisons. The weight of the first was--the HTML/CSS/JS page, was half the weight of the item in the second position. You can imagine how big React and Angular were.

I'll look for that when I wake up a little more this morning.

EDIT: Well, that didn't take long. The graph is actually showing the size of a "bundled web component". Here.


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