Exclude applications from Mozilla VPN protection

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When you browse the internet with Mozilla VPN enabled, your data goes through an encrypted tunnel that protects the data from all your applications by default. with Split-tunneling, you can choose to allow data from specific applications to pass through this tunnel while excluding data from all other apps.

To exclude applications from VPN protection, follow these steps:

How to exclude apps from VPN protection

  1. Open Mozilla VPN and go to Settings (the gear vpn settings icon icon).
  2. Tap (or click) Network settings.
  3. Select App permissions.
  4. Make sure that the switch next to Protect all Apps with VPN is off.
  5. Under Exclude Apps from VPN Protection, select the apps whose data you don't want to go through the VPN tunnel.

Common questions

Why would I want to exclude certain applications?

Excluding some applications may speed up your browsing.

My Excluded app cannot connect to the internet

Some excluded apps need to be restarted once Mozilla VPN is turned on.

I can’t add Microsoft Store apps to the list of excluded apps

Microsoft store apps (non-win32 aka UWP apps) are not supported.

My app is not on the list

You can scroll to the bottom of the list and add the missing application manually.

I can’t see the app permissions menu in the settings on Linux

On Linux, the split tunneling feature is only available if the following two conditions are met:

  • The net_cls control group has been mounted somewhere. On Ubuntu, this should be something like /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls
  • The user is running a GTK-based desktop environment. Specifically, we look at the value of the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable, and expect to find one of GNOME MATE Unity or X-Cinnamon in there.

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