Mozilla has been looking to expand its services and products beyond its Firefox web browser in an effort to diversify its profits. One of those endeavors is its VPN service that started life as a Firefox extension, before transitioning to a closed beta and then a publicly available service.
The initial releases, however, only supported Windows, Android and iOS. The company has now expanded its support to include macOS and Linux, rounding out support for every major platform.
Mozilla VPN currently offers service in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. This makes its focus far more narrow than competing services, such as ExpressVPN, although Mozilla says more countries will be added.
Mozilla promises it doesn’t log network activity and doesn’t restrict bandwidth. Like many of its competitors, Mozilla VPN can be run on five different devices from a single account.
The company has claimed that its service is faster than rivals because it uses less code. In our testing, however, those claims seem highly subjective, based on the selected VPN server.
For example, starting with an internet connection that averages 35 to 40 Mbps, we connected to Mozilla VPN using the three closest available locations. Two of the locations yielded speeds ranging from 0.37 to 0.44 Mbps. The third location, Chicago, yielded speeds of 32 and 33 Mbps.
While not comprehensive, our brief testing shows Mozilla still has some work to do before it rivals ExpressVPN, widely considered the fastest service available.
Nonetheless, with Mozilla’s well-established reputation for protecting user privacy, their entry into the market is a welcome one.