Does it offer the same system-wide protection as the desktop VPN product; or, does it only use the VPN for socks-proxied traffic through the extension-created SOCKS port, and so those protections are applied within the browser; or, it doesn’t protect against temporary interruptions; or, orher?

I can’t experiment with this during my workday, and we’ve reached the limit of information available without running it and testing, so I can’t help resolve this further right now.