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Opera, the company behind a cross-platform browser that currently holds around 2% of the world’s browser market has announced that it is adding a new unlimited, free VPN to its browser.

This VPN enables users to hide their IP from websites, change the region they appear to be browsing from, and generally create a more secure connection.

Unlike Opera’s paid VPN service named Surfeasy, with additional features and a more complete VPN for whole-system privacy and security, the VPN built in to the Opera browser would only really be useful to connections maintained out by the browser itself.

There are, of course, disadvantages to using a VPN - especially a free one that will likely be overwhelmed with traffic once users discover that Opera browser can manage torrent downloads.

Speed is certainly decreased, as data is being fed to you through a remote server rather than being more directly routed to you from the original host. Security on Opera’s new free VPN isn’t yet widely tested for real-world security, and the method and type of encryption is neither set in stone at this early development stage or announced.

At this time, the new feature is limited to Opera Developer releases, and hasn’t been brought over to the general-release browser. It is also currently not available for mobile versions of the browser.

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