Firefox 149 hides your ip for free—inside the browser only, 50 gb cap

Mozilla slips a zero-cost VPN into next week’s Firefox 149, betting that 50 GB of encrypted browser traffic will lure privacy-paranoid users away from data-hoovering rivals. The catch: everything outside the chrome—Spotify, Zoom, your torrent client—keeps broadcasting your real IP.

The proxy, baked into the build that ships 24 March, spins up automatically, no extension ritual required. Mozilla swears it keeps no logs and sells no records, a pledge it can afford because the gratis tier is engineered to feel just hamstrung enough to push heavy users toward the paid Mozilla VPN.

How the free tunnel works

Each tab routes through a single relay chosen for latency, not geography. You cannot pretend to be in Tokyo; the algorithm hands you the nearest node, often in your own country. The 50 GB monthly ceiling—tracked server-side—drops to zero-day throttling once crossed. Early beta testers report a 15-20 % speed tax on European long-distance routes, negligible for plain browsing, painful for 4K streams.

Flip the switch and a shield icon appears; flip it again and the session dies. Mozilla routes DNS through the same relay, closing the common WebRTC leak that exposes true addresses even on some paid VPNs. But split-tunneling is absent; either every domain inside Firefox rides the proxy or none do.

The anti-ai panic button and side-by-side tabs

Version 149 also plants a one-click kill switch for on-device generative features—summaries, autocomplete, chat sidebars—answering the growing backlash against slurping user prompts for model training. A new split-view lets two sites coexist in a single window, dragging links from left to right without detours through the tab bar. Tab notes, synced to the cloud, append tiny sticky pads to the top of each page, a nod to power users who treat the browser like a workstation.

All three toys roll out first in the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Spain, Brazil and Japan queue for “later this spring,” Mozilla says, without pinning a calendar.

Bottom line: if your threat model is café Wi-Fi snoops or a nosy ISP, Firefox’s built-in relay is the simplest shield you’ll never notice. Try to tunnel Netflix libraries or BitTorrent swarms and you’ll slam into the data ceiling fast. For Mozilla, that friction is the sales funnel; for users, it is the price of free.