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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

K. To be honest, this was pretty obvious to me. Did people really think it was a full VPN?

I agree.

There's no good reason why a web browser would make its own network layer connection to support non-HTTP sessions. Session layer proxies have forever been how this is done.

Baking OpenVPN into the browser doesn't seem like a horrible idea.

There's no way it can stay free can it? It seems like a crazily expensive feature for them to bake in..

I mean they can insert a client that allows people to use their server of choice.

I can install the browser without root privileges. This is an absolute must have for me. Installing a browser for a user shoukd not require root.

How would you get a non-privileged executable to take control of full network?

It doesn't.

While that's the most common way to run a VPN, it's not the only way. You use TUN/TAP devices because you want arbitrary programs to use them. In this case, you only want Opera to use the VPN connection. You don't need a TUN device for that.

So it is possible to set up a proper vpn connection without root privileges. I didn't know this was possible.

This sounds perfect to me. A custom corporate wrapper for a web browser that lives in its own silo. Workers who are working from home for the day can use that app for work while keeping everything else like Spotify or YouTube or Netflix from going on a long roundabout trip through the VPN. Sounds perfect if you ask me.

Having a browser break non-web traffic doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

A full VPN could be useful to wrap Java Applets or custom browser extensions. I've found their support for proxy settings unreliable, especially if you don't want to leak info to the main network.

(I ended up setting up a VM and routing everything through Tor, which worked but was complete overkill. It would be great if you could force an application (and all subprocess) to use a certain connection. Put a control in the titlebar/system menu that lets me select interfaces. Please, desktop developers, steal this idea!)

Most of the time in a casual, public, marketing or just generally not technical setting, "VPN" is just the modern tern for "Proxy". I'm not sure why that happened to be honest, except maybe that "Virtual Private Network" is more marketable than "Proxy"?

Maybe because proxies got a bad name from sketchy free proxies? There are sketchy free VPNs now, but "Businesses use VPNs for security" is a pretty powerful idea, I guess.

That's a good point. If you're under 40, "Proxy" probably conjures images of those free proxies you mention. Over that, I have to believe you're going to favor the legal terminology at first blush.

I can understand this argument.

The term "proxy" immediately brings me back to the days of trying to bypass the high school content filters using sketchy foreign proxies…

I still remember the day I leveled up by setting up an SSH tunnel via my family's PC and walking into school with putty.exe on a thumb drive!

This is a very technical solution. I just asked my homeroom teacher, who was also the schools main IT guy, to unblock whatever website I wanted. He was pretty cool. Also installed Visual C# for me on the schools computers so I could program during my down time.

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