Two times the VPN

I have long been trying to decide on whether to use a VPN or not, and your recent articles have decided it for me. I occasionally use Tor for browsing but it’s not as friendly as Firefox and some websites will not load (and I can’t figure out how to make it the default browser to test it further) so I was taken by TunnelBear VPN since it allows the use of other browsers. Plus, it’s free!

I also run Disconnect ( disconnect.me) as a separate app, thanks to Firefox using it as a plugin, and have been amazed at how many tracking attempts it has stopped in a few months. Thirty thousand and counting! Main question is — will I have to remove this plugin if I download and start using TunnelBear? I am assuming that the tracker blocking undertaken by both apps is different but will there be any conflict? Also, I’d be interested in an article about the changes to Firefox, because a lot of companies seem to be having trouble optimising their websites to accommodate the changes (Java and so on) and are suggesting only using either IE, Chrome and others.

[ CHRIS FOWLER ]

Ed replies: A VPN certainly provides peace of mind, doesn’t it? We’ve gone into internet security a lot this issue in our superguide (from page 52) so there are even more ways to make your browsing and digital life safer. As far as we can tell, there shouldn’t be any conflict between Disconnect and TunnelBear, but that’s a question we’ll put to our networking expert for another issue. Since there are free options for both, it’s worth experimenting to see how this double up affects performance.