Technology

I was also, initially, a little bit confused with how this was being framed. I understand now having read it more closely, but on first reading of the line "The idea is to provide one more alternative – beside the Tor Network – to browse the internet with more privacy" because of the word "alternative" I thought you were suggesting it as a replacement for Tor.

Proton

If you're doing a peer-to-peer (P2P) related activity, port forwarding is very important for improving speed or enabling the service at all. That's because your router blocks incoming traffic from certain ports by default, ports that are used for a P2P connection. To get around this, you can 'forward' the specific port that is used for the P2P activity you're using, letting your router know that the traffic you expect to see from a specific port is good to let through.

You can simply leave port forwarding to your personal router, but if you want to stay anonymous while participating in P2P connections, then you'll want to use a VPN service. If a VPN service doesn't utilize port forwarding, then any P2P connections you use will either be straight up impossible, or very slow over the VPN. The P2P service you're attempting to use needs to access a specific port on the VPN's router, which needs forwarding to work properly. For example, you wanted to host a gaming server without giving away your actual IP address, then a VPN with port forwarding is desirable. The same can be said for torrenting.

TL;DR: VPNS with port forwarding matter if you want to stay anonymous while using P2P services.

Because my program uses a different port

Default Firefox settings with uBlock Origin results in everything passing except the unique fingerprint, and hardening Firefox to do that is easy enough with something like Privacy Badger, some fingerprint anonymization extensions or just disabling JavaScript. From my experience, though, doing that will make the web nigh-unusable for the average user with sites regularly breaking or constantly spamming you with Captchas wherever you go.

I'm curious how "usable" Mullvade Browser is for the everyday user, compared to Firefox with uBlock Origin.

Edit: Fixed typo

It's available for MacOS. I'd like to see mobile (iOS and Android) support, too.

I see thanks. Damn I hate that privacy means compromising that much. Not sure I’d get use to it. But I will certainly give it a try

When I used TOR I just assumed it was slow because my laptop will be old enough to legally gamble in a couple years...

You got me interested about this browser ! When I first saw the news I assumed it would just be another chromium based privacy browser, i did not even bother looking into it

I was wrong?