Would these come or are these planned on the roadmap? This is the only thing that stops me from using this server over others.
This is not on our roadmap, we have other major projects in the pipeline which we plan to announce or share more about later (no ETA).
Can you explain and help us understand why having no browser extension is a deal breaking for you ie. what’s your daily use case.
There’s various uses that makes it so a browser extension is somewhat of a must.
The most important one to me is whitelisting websites. There’s a lot of websites that I do not need to access through the VPN that I trust (banking) or that do not play well with VPNs (e.g. d2jsp in my case). Having to turn off the desktop VPN for those websites is massively inconvenient because it exposes my entire computer whereas normally with a browser extension I’d have a whitelist.
The second most important thing is to not have to reset my entire OS connection because of a server switch. People that pay for VPNs are not always good actors. A lot of times the best server to me is often banned on a website I need to use it on (e.g. bestbuy.ca). So I need to switch servers to get an IP that’s not banned. Which resets all the connections on my computer (Messenger, WhatsApp, Important Downloads, etc.). This is massively inconvenient.
The third one, not as important, is that having a browser extension gives me the possibility to double hop and keep track of the servers I’m double hoping to maximize geolocation thwarting + speed optimization. So let’s say I live in Vancouver, I’d use a Vancouver server for the desktop app to put the speed/ping as low as I can, but I’d put the browser extension to where I want to be at to escape geolocation (e.g. Seattle for US geolocation bypass). This is not AS relevant.
Usually my setup is:
- Desktop app that has split tunneling and whitelist my browser + games that ban VPNs (e.g. Diablo 2).
- Browser extension that’s always-on with a browser that starts on a blank page.
This gives me the most flexibility to my needs. And that’s flexibility I can’t afford to lose as a Desktop user.
Thank you for the clear explanation!
Agree an extension would be useful in some cases and much easier to work with.
You can do most of what your wanting with selective routing at the router level (OPNsense). Set up IVPN server in a VLAN for desired devices and then have a whitelist alias + firewall rule that diverts traffic through clear WAN for banking, Netflix, etc. You can get crazy and also setup several other VPN VLANs with selective routing for geo restricted sites/other scenarios. Opportunities are endless and no need to use any VPN apps on any of the devices (less hardware load too).
A setup could be:
VLAN1 = main non U.S. VPN + extra VPN for load balance/failover
Whitelist1 alias = geo restricted sites to send to VLAN2 U.S. VPN
VLAN2 = U.S. VPN
Whitelist2 alias = anti VPN sites to send to VLAN3 dedicated U.S. IP
VLAN3 = dedicated U.S. IP VPN (another provider)
Whitelist3 alias = sites blocking dedicated VPN to send through VLAN4 clearnet
VLAN4 = clearnet
Firewall rules allocate where traffic goes based on whitelists.
Thank you for reaching out. Have a good day!