In brief: On April 1 of last year, Cloudflare unveiled "WARP" to the world, a high-speed VPN that came as a free add-on to the company's 1.1.1.1 mobile DNS app. Now, precisely a year later, Cloudflare is using April Fool's Day to announce more WARP news: the VPN is officially coming to macOS and Windows as a public beta.

The high-speed VPN will offer the same functionality on desktop that it does on mobile. It will use the same "fast, efficient" Wireguard protocol to secure connections, and its core functionality will be entirely free for everyone to access; just as it is on Android and iOS.

Cloudflare chose April 1 as its seemingly traditional WARP-related announcement date to make a point. As it said last year, the company has never found the April Fools' Day antics of other tech companies all that appealing. Indeed, Cloudflare seems quite bitter about the day, stating the following back in 2019:

While most days the Internet is full of promise and innovation, on 'April Fools' a handful of elite tech companies decide to waste the time of literally billions of people with juvenile jokes that only they find funny. Cloudflare has never been one for the traditional April Fools antics.

Cloudflare hopes WARP will not only obfuscate your internet activity from prying eyes when activated, but also potentially speed up your connection. That was one of the main selling points for the VPN's mobile release, and Cloudflare promises to carry the functionality over to its desktop client.

WARP+ customers will be the first to gain access to WARP's desktop beta, which will let them take advantage of Cloudflare's Argo network for "even faster" internet speeds. Everyone should expect to see WARP for macOS and Windows go public sometime in the next few months. There's no ETA yet, but Cloudflare wants to release the software more quickly on desktop than it did on mobile – it took the company roughly five months to release the WARP 1.1.1.1 add-on to the world.

If you want to be among the first to gain access to the beta, you can sign up for the WARP desktop wait list right here using your email address.