Mozilla VPN Review

While it’s fairly common for bigger tech brands to rent servers from or use the infrastructure of dedicated VPN services, they usually have fairly straightforward logging policies. Mozilla VPN’s is a little confusing, by comparison.

As Mozilla is its own entity, but uses Mullvad’s server network and technologies for its VPN, it has a logging policy which is a combination of both companies’.

We reached out to Mozilla for clarification and it was happy to explain to us how data collection and logging works for Mozilla VPN users. We’ve summarized this information in the table below:

Our main concern was that Mozilla’s standard privacy policy would apply to users of its VPN. However, while that data is collected at the creation of your Mozilla account (which is required to use the VPN) it is not associated with your Mozilla VPN account usage.

The only personal data logged by Mozilla VPN which is actually tied to your usage is information about your device, such as model and operating system.

All Mozilla VPN usage data is handled and processed by Mullvad. As we said in our review of Mullvad VPN, it’s an exceptional no-logs policy.

You can 100% trust Mullvad to treat your privacy with complete respect, with next to nothing being logged on its global server network.

US & Swedish jurisdictions are poor choices

Our only real complaints with the two logging policies at play here are the jurisdictions of the two companies involved.

Firefox is incorporated in the US, while Mullvad is based in Sweden. The US is one of the worst countries on Earth for online privacy and is a part of the intrusive Five Eyes Alliance.

Sweden isn’t as bad as the US, but is still an EU member and as such is part of various international data-sharing agreements.

The good news here is that, with so little data logged, it’s unlikely you’ll need to worry about these jurisdictions. They are still a factor though, if a minor one.

We connected to Mozilla VPN servers in nine cities spread across six different continents. We test using a 100Mbps internet connection, similar to the baseline speed of your home internet connection.

Here’s a table showing Mozilla VPN’s speed test results:

When connected to a nearby server in New York, US, Mozilla VPN suffers just an 4% download speed loss – this is very good. You’ll barely notice any difference to your internet speeds with Mozilla VPN connected to a server near you.

It also performed very well in a selection of extremely distant locations like the US West Coast and Germany, and when connected to a server in neighboring Canada downloads slowed by an indistinguishable 1%

When Mozilla VPN is running at its absolute maximum it comes close to the fastest VPNs on the market. While conducting multiple tests over a longer period of time we did notice some fluctuations, but not enough to seriously concern us.

Mozilla VPN records very impressive numbers for both upload and download speeds, wherever you are in the world. This is partly down to its total commitment to WireGuard, one of the fastest VPN protocols available.

We also want to give special credit to Mozilla VPN for being so quick to connect. Establishing a connection to a server takes no longer than a split second after you click the ‘connect’ button – it’s one of the consistently fastest we’ve ever tested.

Here are the few services that we found Mozilla VPN worked with in our testing:

Mozilla VPN’s ability to unblock streaming libraries is unfortunately tied to Mullvad’s ability to do so, as it operates using Mullvad’s infrastructure. Despite being a great VPN, Mullvad is terrible for streaming – and therefore Mozilla VPN is too.

The good news is that we were able to unblock HBO Max, an excellent US streaming service with lots of unique content – we just connected to Mozilla VPN’s US – Raleigh server and it let us stream straight away.

HBO Max is one of the few services Mozilla VPN works to unblock.

We were also able to watch UK-based streaming service All 4 by using the United Kingdom – Manchester server.

Those two services are the limit of Mozilla VPN’s streaming abilities. Every other popular service we attempted to access blocked us immediately or, in some cases, wouldn’t even let us log in.

A good streaming VPN should be able to unlock plenty of services, as well as multiple Netflix libraries from around the world to give you access to as much content as possible. ExpressVPN is the best VPN for streaming – it unblocks 10 Netflix libraries, BBC iPlayer, and more.

Here’s a quick summary of showing how Mozilla VPN performed in our torrenting tests:

You can torrent on all 655 Mozilla VPN servers without any data limits or throttling. We’ve verified through testing that the kill switch works properly (even if there’s no way to toggle it on or off in the app) so you don’t need to worry about your IP address being revealed if your connection drops.

The only real problem when torrenting with Mozilla VPN is that we found its speeds to be extremely inconsistent. Our test torrent file downloads at 10.0MiB/s without a VPN. One set of four tests with Mozilla VPN turned on logged an average download bitrate of almost 9.5MiB/s – that would make it one of the fastest torrenting VPNs we’ve tested.

However, a further set of tests measured Mozilla VPN at a much slower average download bitrate of 5.1MiB/s. We tried everything to recapture those initial blazing-fast speeds, but nothing worked.

You might be fortunate and consistently experience the first set of speeds, but we consider them to be a fluke rather than the standard.

Mozilla VPN’s only other flaw for torrenting is a lack of port forwarding, which is not available on any platform. If you want a technical VPN with plenty of features (plus excellent speeds), our AirVPN review found it to be an excellent choice.

We test a VPN’s ability to beat online censorship by installing it on our remote test server located in Shanghai, China.

The issue we ran into while testing Mozilla VPN against censorship is that our test server runs Windows 10. Mozilla VPN’s Windows client does not have access to an advanced feature labeled in-app as ‘Tunnel VPN through port 53/DNS’.

This feature is available on macOS, Android, and Linux – only Windows is missing it. It’s meant to be used to obfuscate VPN traffic with the specific goal of masking it and therefore helping you beat censorship. However, that one restriction means that we can’t properly test it.

Mozilla VPN might work in China – so long as you aren’t using Windows. We found that without port 53 enabled we were still blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

However, Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad’s network for its servers. Mullvad has never worked in China in our testing. It’s unlikely that Mozilla VPN would be any different.

Mozilla VPN’s download page is also blocked in China. If you’re planning on using it in a country which censors its internet then you’ll need to download it before traveling.

Our regular testing has found Astrill VPN is the best VPN for China. It will also beat censorship in countries like Russia and the UAE.

We can’t fault Mozilla VPN for its security. It passed every leak test we put it through, using the excellent WireGuard protocol as standard.

Mozilla VPN did not ever leak our IP address or DNS requests.

What’s less conventional, though, is that WireGuard is the only protocol available across all of its apps. Ordinarily VPNs will let you choose from a selection, but not Mozilla VPN. While it’s unusual, though, it doesn’t bother us much as WireGuard is one of the best VPN protocols currently available – it’s super fast and super safe.

Nowhere in the Mozilla VPN app or on the Mozilla website does it clarify what encryption cipher is used. We reached out to Mozilla support which stated that all apps use ChaCha20 encryption. This is standard encryption for WireGuard and, while it varies slightly to the more conventional AES-256, is just as secure.

We then used Wireshark to confirm that Mozilla VPN properly encrypts web traffic – and it does.

If someone were to intercept your data while using Mozilla VPN, this is all that they would see. Mozilla VPN properly encrypts all your traffic.

One of Mozilla’s few extra features is custom DNS, which allows you to pick from ad blocking servers, tracker blocking servers, both at once, or a custom DNS of your own choosing (such as Google or Cloudflare’s).

Mozilla VPN puts up a very respectable ad blocking score. It mostly struggled with social media trackers.

The ad and tracker blockers work well, but they don’t catch everything they should. However, almost every VPN in-built ad blocker struggles, as we discovered in our in-depth testing on whether or not VPNs actually block ads.

MozillaVPN also offers split tunneling, but only on Windows and Android. It’s not labeled exactly like that in the app, though. To access it you have to head to Settings > App permissions then toggle Protect all apps with VPN to the Off position.

Now you can choose which apps will travel outside of the encrypted VPN tunnel.

Mozilla is a large company with many products, but we still wish that it offered live chat support for its VPN service. It can be frustrating having to wait for an email reply if something is wrong with your product here and now.

That said, we were really impressed with Mozilla VPN’s email support. We fired off a series of fairly technical questions and the Mozilla VPN representative replying to us answered with a level of accuracy and knowledge far higher than what we’re used to seeing from other VPNs.

Mozilla VPN’s support agent knew the exact answer to our question.

There’s a Mozilla VPN online resource hub for doing your own troubleshooting, but it’s limited to just the basics: installation, setup, billing, and other topics like that.

Alternatively, there’s an extensive and active array of forums dedicated to all of Mozilla’s products – including its VPN. Any question you post there is likely to be answered by another user rather than Mozilla staff, but it might be quicker for you than waiting on email support.