A 'Premium' Firefox Is Coming This Fall

An anonymous reader quotes I Programmer:

In an interview by Jan Vollmer for the German online magazine site t3n, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has confirmed plans to launch Firefox Premium later this year. Answering Vollmer's questions about how Mozilla is currently monetized Beard answered:
We are working on three sources of income and we want to rebalance them: We have Search, but we also make content. We have a company called Pocket that discovers and curates content. There is also sponsored content. This is the content business. And the third one we are working on and developing as we think about products and services are premium levels for some of these offerings. You can imagine something like a secure storage solution.

Prompted to say more about a premium offer, he continued:

We also tested VPN. We can tell if you're on a public Wi-Fi network and want to do online banking and say, 'Wow, you really should use VPN.' You can imagine we'll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription. We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues.

Later in the interview, when asked when the subscription services might start Beard tries to be reassuring, saying:

So, what we want to clarify is that there is no plan to charge money for things that are now free. So we will roll out a subscription service and offer a premium level. And the plan is to introduce the first one this year, towards fall. We aim for October.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.