Chris Beard, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, mentioned in an interview with the German publication T3N about the intention to launch a premium service, Firefox Premium (premium.firefox.com), in October of this year, which will offer advanced services through a paid subscription. The details are yet to be announced, but examples include services related to using a VPN and online storage of user data. According to comments made in the interview, a certain amount of traffic on the VPN will be free, while the paid service will be offered to those who need additional bandwidth.
The provision of paid services will help finance the maintenance of resource-intensive infrastructures and allow for additional diversification of revenue sources, reducing on funds from contracts with search engines. The agreement for the default use of the Yahoo search engine in Firefox in the US expires at the end of this year, and it is still unclear whether it will be extended, given Yahoo's acquisition by Verizon.
Testing of a paid VPN in Firefox began last October and is based on providing built-in access through the VPN service ProtonVPN, which was chosen for its comparatively high level of communication channel protection, refusal to log data, and its overall focus on enhancing security and privacy on the Web. ProtonVPN is registered in Switzerland, which has strict privacy protection laws that prevent intelligence agencies from controlling information. ProtonVPN is not on the list of 9 VPN services that were blocked in Russia due to their unwillingness to connect to the registry of prohibited information (ProtonVPN has not yet received a request from Roskomnadzor, but the service has initially stated that it ignores all such requests).
Regarding online storage, the foundation has been laid within the framework of the service , for file sharing between users using end-to-end encryption. Currently, the service is completely free. The upload size limit is set at 1 GB in anonymous mode and 2.5 GB upon creating a registered account. By default, files are deleted after the first download or after 24 hours (the file lifetime can be set from one hour to 7 days). An additional tier may be introduced in Firefox Send for paid users with an extended limit on size and storage time.
Source: opennet.ru
