30 ms·

Container Tabs

843 points by malikNF 10y ago

hkjgkjy 10y ago
As a user, I actually just want my browser to contain less features. Vendors add and add and add features. If I want different user profiles, I already have many users on my OS - I just switch between them. When Chrome came out, I and many others switched to it just because it was lacking so many features. It was great!
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Having features is fine imo, as long as they can be disabled.
- sp0rk 10y ago
  So then use a browser whose stated goal is to be minimal. Container tabs are an amazing addition with great security and privacy benefits. If you think changing OS user profiles is comparable, you either don't fully understand the concept or you are way outside of the demographic of people that will use this.
- altano 10y ago
  Chrome actually already has this feature in the form of profiles. See the top-right icon.
  - richardboegli 10y ago
    Yes it does and I have been using this. But it seems to be per window not tab. Unless I've missed something?
    - gtirloni 10y ago
      It's per window and it remembers the last profile used. I find it hard to manage as other apps will open links on the active window, which might be in the incorrect profile I want to use at that time. I like this new feature in Firefox. OS-level profiles being the slowest method, Chrome profiles being faster but with this annoyances (for me)... Firefox new container tabs look like a more lightweight/faster method for context separation.
    - arthurfm 10y ago
      > it seems to be per window not tab Chromium-based Ghost Browser [1] can do it per tab or tab group. It would be nice if Google implemented the same feature into Chrome since multiple profiles can be a hassle. [1] https://ghostbrowser.com https://ghostbrowser.com
      - richardboegli 10y ago
        This looks EXTREMELY interesting. Thanks for sharing.
    - Sylos 10y ago
      Yeah, this is actually distinctly different from Chrome's profiles. Firefox does already have an equivalent to Chrome's profiles [0], so it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to implement this, if it wasn't different. [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
  - hkjgkjy 10y ago
    It does, sadly!
grenoire 10y ago
I would love this feature and it would actually get me to switch to Firefox in a heartbeat. I'm currently using Chrome just because of the the (subjectively) better developer tools, but this is a feature that would make my life so much easier!
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Firefox tab management is lackluster compared to Chrome; container tabs won't change that :/ Every time I try using Firefox I pretty quickly hit the limitation on selecting tabs. Chrome lets you select tabs like files in a file manager: Shift click for ranges, ctrl+click for adding/removing single tabs. You can then drag & drop the group in or out of various windows, close all at once, etc. Container tabs imho won't be usable unless something like this is in place. When dealing with as few as 5+ tabs, I certainly wouldn't want to manually tweak them one at a time. Can't imagine for 20+, 50+. But the idea is nice for feature separation, I like that a lot.
  - oblio 10y ago
    Firefox's default tab management might be worse than Chrome's, but once you add something like Tab Mix Plus into the mix, Chrome starts looking like a Ford Model T next to a Ferrari.
  - iokanuon 10y ago
    Try the Tree Style Tab addon for Firefox. Managing 100+ tabs in Firefox is a breeze. I can't bring myself to use Chrome now.
    - richardboegli 10y ago
      Great minds think a like ;)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - richardboegli 10y ago
Tajnymag 10y ago
Lack of history separation seems quite pitty to me imo :-/
- Sylos 10y ago
  Well, that's not really the idea behind the feature. If you want that, you should work with different Firefox Profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
thewisenerd 10y ago
why isn't "Saved Passwords" and "Saved Search and Form data" separated between containers? There have been autofill/form-data attacks in the past[0] and there was a story recently on HN's front page showing the same[1]. I'd like to point out that mozilla already has a configuration option to disable form data saving on https sites, 'browser.formfill.saveHttpsForms'. Why?[2] > Right; the idea is to eliminate "opportunism". If my laptop is stolen, Firefox's current behavior makes it easy for a thief to find a https: site in my history, go to it, check out, and then just let autocomplete hand them my complete credit card details. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171547 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252486 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252486
- Timshel 10y ago
  Probably because of usability, they are still exploring how to integrate it in the browser (it will probably stay hidden behind a pref for a while). Right now no configuration screen is aware of the container feature.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    Yeah usability is a toughie, an other feature I'd be interested in would be some sort of container inheritance (e.g. sub-identities in a work context when clients provide office 365 identities or to test projects under different identities all within the broader work context) but that's even harder to make easy to use.
- wilde 10y ago
  If the attacker has physical access to your machine, you have bigger problems. They can just read the autofill DB at that point.
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I also wish it was toggable to make history dependant on a container. My personal history will likely grow and have too much garbage, it would be nice to wipe it and have it not affect my work container.
sirn 10y ago
This looks amazing! I have been using Self-Destructing Cookies[1] for few years and while I think the extension is great, I always feel there's not enough isolation between tabs. For example, if I have Twitter logged in in one tab, and other tab contain Twitter button, then the other tab can still have access to my Twitter cookie. (Because Twitter tab is still active, so SDC would not destroy the cookie.) I know this is solvable using tracker blocker, but something like SDC but worked on tab container level would be very welcomed. (Other side effect of using SDC is I seems to get the harder ReCAPTCHA that make you click an object until all of it disappear, with new ones popping up after clicking. Usually took about 5-10 clicks. Very annoying.) [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
- edgartaor 10y ago
  You may want to try uMatrix[1]. It block any 3rd party content by default (cookies, scripts,...) . So Twitter buttons (and similar) do not load by default, but you can allow it with two clicks. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
  - sirn 10y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, although I'm already using uMatrix :-) SDC + uMatrix do make a really great combination, and I'm really glad I use these extensions when I see some sites loading 10+ trackers that are not relevant to site's function at all.
altano 10y ago
This is awesome. Microsoft's identity system is a nightmare so switching between my Office 365 email account and my OneDrive/music accounts is always annoying. I'd love to be able to contain each and stay logged in to both accounts. At work I test lots of user accounts on the same site and make heavy use of Chrome profiles for that. This would fill a similar role. But while I'm glad to have them, no average user would ever understand any of these concepts as presented in these screenshots.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
This would be nice for using more than one Twitter account without needing to open one in private browsing (TweetDeck exists, and I do use it, but I prefer Twitter Web). I hope it makes it to the release channel.
JohnBooty 10y ago
I am a Mozilla supporter and FF is my "daily driver" browser. Very interested in this feature. Chrome has had it for a years, and it's a killer feature for many developers. It's very very useful to have multiple browser windows open, each logged into the same site as a different user. A lot of people do this by opening multiple browsers (FF, Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc) but that has its limits and it just adds another variable my poor brain would prefer not to handle. Also very useful for home/work separation. One browser account for work and one for home. And also maybe one for porn. So that when you're screensharing in a meeting and you type a URL into the browser, you don't get autocomplete suggestions for your favorite porn sites popping up. Happened to an old (married) boss of mine once while displaying his screen on the projector... typed "a" into the URL field and the browser helpfully suggested he navigate to AdultFriendFinder. Right in front of some clients. :) Firefox's "container tabs" implementation may be slightly confusing. Chrome's implementation is dead simple. One identity per window, and the identity name is always displayed in the upper right. With FF's container tabs, I'll have one identity per tab, and I can see they're color coded, but that means I'll have to mentally map colors to identities. It's more flexible than Chrome's implementation but there's more cognitive overhead involved. Also, what's up with the name "container tabs?" That tells me nothing about what they do. All tabs... contain things. I think they need to rename it to "identity tabs" or something. How on Earth would anybody ever guess that "container tabs" is related to identities and data sharing? We'll see how it plays out though. I'm excited to try it and I am continually grateful for Mozilla's efforts. In fact this reminds me I haven't donated to them in a while....
- rcthompson 10y ago
  Edit: I guess I'm misremembering how Chrome works, or maybe they changed it since I've last used Chrome seriously. I'll leave the comment so the replies make sense. Original comment: I'm kind of surprised that Mozilla went with a per-tab approach here, since they went with per-window for private browsing (while Chrome did the opposite: per-tab private browsing and per-window profiles).
  - dingo_bat 10y ago
    That's not right. Chrome's incognito mode is per window.
therealmarv 10y ago
Tech question: Does Firefox has technical process seperation of tabs nowdays? This is one of the main features of Chrome since 1.0 and just want to know if Firefox has something similar finally.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  It's in a sort of alpha state I believe. Will be a while until it rolls out to everyone.
- ec109685 10y ago
  Chrome groups multiple tabs into the same process.
- Sylos 10y ago
  The foundational work is there, it's currently still going through testing, although you can already manually enable it and it works rather well, but as of right now it's not planned to have complete separation for each individual tab, as that just chews up a lot of resources with relatively little gain in performance. What's planned instead, is to use a set number of processes across all tabs. So, if this would be two processes, then every other tab will share a process with one another. And they'll probably have around 5 processes for tabs at a maximum once this is fully rolled out, at least for the foreseeable future. You can manually change this maximum number of processes in about:config, though. And if you do set it to something like 500, i.e. just a very big number that you're not likely to hit in number of tabs, then it will separate each tab into its own process, with whatever performance problems come with that.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    The about:config pref to control the number of content processes shared by tabs is "dom.ipc.processCount".
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    Thank you for this extensive reply! :)
alkonaut 10y ago
Why do I even need this? Isn't it by default so that site1.com can't see cookies from site2.com for example?
- jakobegger 10y ago
  The problem is when site1.com is Twitter, and site2.com includes a Twitter button, then Twitter can see that you are browsing site2.com
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    Ok - I'm happy to break all such functionality by refusing the use of those cookies. I'm almost sure Ghostery already does this. Is there no legit/useful use for this (I don't count fb auth or like/tweet buttons)?
    - jakobegger 10y ago
      Ghostery blocks specific well known trackers. An approach like Container Tabs would prevent these types of tracking in principle. Valid use for 3rd party cookies is something like single sign on. (Eg. sign into all Google services at the same time, even though they use separate domains)
    - 0xffff2 10y ago
      All you have to do to block this is disable third party cookies. I did this years ago and for my usage I've never even noticed.
- Too 10y ago
  site1.com might include embedded images that are hosted by site2.com, so may site3.com, site4.com, site5.com and site6.com Now site2.com (aka facebook like button) knows that you have visited both site1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. You can work around this in some ways by disabling "third party cookies" but this breaks certain features, such as using your facebook identity to post comments on other sites, so sadly all browsers enable this by default.
znpy 10y ago
I've been doing this for years using both Firefox' and Thunderbird's multiple-profile features. Just run "firefox --no-remote -ProfileManager" and here you go. So the serious question is: how is this any different from using multiple profile? Multiple profile also have the pro/con that they are actual different processes, so there's no information leak between profiles whatsoever (well, unless some serious hacking happens). Edit: being different processes with different profiles, they also have different configuration folders, different cookie sets, different password storage locations etc...
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I was using ParrotSec OS for a few months and it had this as the default for opening Firefox, it would prompt you to ask which profile you wanted to use, it was somewhat handy. Firefox can be set to always open the profile manager on startup by default. But what they're saying now is per tab vs per window.
- drinkjuice 10y ago
  +1, and I would like to add: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/change-window-icons/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/change-window-ic... To answer your question, it's probably quicker and takes up less HD space :) And now we can have profiles and container tabs in those profiles, or just use profiles or just use container tabs, how cool is that.
  - znpy 10y ago
    > And now we can have profiles and container tabs in those profiles Yo Dawg! We heard you like profiles, so we put profiles in your profiles so you can use profiles while you use profiles!
    - Sylos 10y ago
      I actually have a use-case for this. I have a "webdev"-profile where I've got none of my usual webpage-breaking privacy extensions, I do have Tree Style Tabs there, because when coding I tend to open a ton of tabs, and well, then I use the Container Tabs, since I need to be able to see my webpage as logged-out user, as logged-in user etc.
muddysky 10y ago
Slightly OT: This page reads like Mozilla's Developer Network (MDN) online documentation, I had to read the first sentences few times until I got what container tabs are about. However, very nice feature.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  That's because it's on the Mozilla wiki. I'd expect better docs on the support site (and maybe MDN) once the feature nears completion/release. The mozilla wiki contains all kinds of odds and ends about random ongoing projects (status, documentation) and is mostly developer-facing.
rlpb 10y ago
I would like to be able to configure my browser to open every URL in a domain-specific "container", unless I say otherwise. Say site www.a.org includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, and www.evilcorp.org sets a cookie. When I then go to www.b.org and it includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, I don't expect the cookie to be sent back. In other words, the cookie should be tied to www.a.org, even though it actually came from www.evilcorp.org. It should only be sent if my URL bar says www.a.org AND the image is coming from www.evilcorp.org. I feel that this is how browsers should have been designed in the first place. I welcome this Container Tabs feature, but I don't think it quite goes far enough to restore my privacy.
- chii 10y ago
  how would you do oauth (or openid style login) with this then?
  - rlpb 10y ago
    I would be happy to whitelist the sites with which I use oauth/openid to log in. If I didn't, it would still work; I'd just have to reauthenticate once for every site.
    - bwilliams18 10y ago
      you could even just whitelist oauth/openid to work across all sites.
  - diafygi 10y ago
    Nitpick: OAuth doesn't require cookies. You can track someone through the state parameter in the redirect url.
- oftenwrong 10y ago
  I generally disable third party cookies. Causes very few problems ime.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  As someone else intimated, isn't that just disabling 3rd party cookies, which has been a browser feature for ages?
nmy 10y ago
This is why I'm using Firefox nightly. It is a killer feature to keep open my many AWS and GCP accounts (one container per client). It still needs to be polished though.
chrisper 10y ago
This is pretty awesome. Very useful. My school's security is a joke. You cannot log out except by closing your browser. The session also never expires. Not only that, but now they moved to a "single-sign on." If I sign in on one app, it signs me in for all apps.
lmedinas 10y ago
Anyone know when this feature is planned to hit Beta or Stable ?
- Sylos 10y ago
  Do you mean officially considered beta/stable quality or just that it's there in the Beta or Stable version, so that you don't have to migrate to a less stable version of Firefox in order to use it? If it's the latter, there's two preferences that you can flip in about:config to enable it (even in Firefox Stable): privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled Mind though that since this feature is currently still under active development, that it might actually be less error-prone in the normally less stable versions of Firefox.
  - lmedinas 10y ago
    This is why I ask when it will be enabled by default on Beta or Release. Any idea when is planned ?
    - malikNF 10y ago
      This is available on Firefox Nightly.
jbverschoor 10y ago
I'm long searching for a solution to do this is a much broader way.. On the OS level. Private Work A Work B Work C Ideally it would seem like a different user. (Filesystem, cmd-tab). But easily accessible like the three finger swipe. Fast user switching doesn't cut it. I even tried logging in on my local machine using VNC or remove desktop.. Is having 4 VMs the only way?
- lorenzk 10y ago
  Qubes OS does exactly this: www.qubes-os.org
- chowells 10y ago
  Have you considered https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/? It's not exactly what you're asking, but it has similarities.
- beagle3 10y ago
  On Linux, you just set up another user and it's one "sudo" command away. Long time ago (win2000, before XP)I tried to do it on windows with the "runas" command, but things like IE would keep popping up with the wrong user (they managed to communicate with the desktop and have that open the new window) so it wasn't a good solution. Perhaps it is better now.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Yet another potential solution, if you're on Linux. This is more on the accessible side of things, it doesn't do separation as much as you would like it: KDE Plasma has what they call "Activities". In its basic idea, it's kind of like fancy desktop workspaces. So, it does separate your windows into workspace-like groups, but you can also set what files and widgets are displayed on the desktop on a per-Activity basis. So, you don't have a different filesystem, but you can have a folder or multiple folders displayed on each Activity's desktop. Also, shortcuts to different applications, including for example Firefox profiles, as well as different sets of widgets, for example I like to use the little post-it note widgets to write things down on. And yeah, with that you can then just switch between Activities via a simple keyboard shortcut or by clicking an Activity-selector on your panel (if you've put one there).
DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
not needed if you're running Qubes-OS :)
j_s 10y ago
I use the Qupzilla browser incognito mode which is a separate session per-window by default. It uses the Chrome guts and has a few rough edges.
x1798DE 10y ago
Right now, what I'm doing is that all my standard browsing happens on Firefox, with uMatrix blocking JS and just generally locked down. For anything where I want to log in or have a persistent identity (stackoverflow, gmail, etc), I set up separate Chrome profiles and manually open each site in the appropriate profile. Honestly, this whole thing is a bit of a pain - my ideal solution would be one where I can set up "domain groups" matching on the URL in the URL bar, each fully isolated from one another (different extensions, settings, caches, histories, forms, cookie stores, etc), and clicking links that go from one profile to another, all referer information is stripped out. Anything not matching one of the domain groups would go to the "default session" (which I would configure to be completely locked down and ephemeral). Additionally, I'd want a context-menu item "Open link in group <x>", which would open something matching another domain group in the domain group of my choice, so that I could do things like visit gmail in two different groups.
- echelon 10y ago
  Context based on domains sounds like a perfect and elegant solution. I hope someone from Mozilla is reading this.
  - _dark_matter_ 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure about 90% of us Mozilla engineers are on hacker news :)
  - Touche 10y ago
    Not really, many people have both work and personal gmail accounts, for example. Contexts are not based on domains.
- SonicSoul 10y ago
  hmm so you can log into multiple profiles at once in chrome and have them run under separate session spaces? i found that i can have on session space in regular chrome and one more in incognito, but all tabs in incognito seem to share that same session. i.e. opening a new tab automatically shares the same session as the other tabs in x domain. Maybe there is a way to control this behavior?
hosh 10y ago
Cool. I had been using multifox plugin for testing websites, but it won't work with the new multiprocess engine and the plugin author had no intention of porting it. Glad to see an alternative. I use Firefox for testing my dev work but reading about the privacy use-case, I might seriously consider switching from Chrome as my main browser.
newscracker 10y ago
This is really awesome!!! I used to manage this kind of separation by using private windows and using different browsers. I don't really want to manage these by window or create user profiles, as may be the case in other browsers.
nikcub 10y ago
This is a neat idea but it doesn't implement the main reason I use separate profiles in Chromium - different security contexts based on how much you trust a site. Example: my main general browsing profile has flash, PDFs and all plugins disabled, absolutely all handlers switched off, all hardware access off, WebGL switched off, no account logins and uBlock Origin set to aggressively block most third-party requests. My second most used context is for personal sites I login for - with access to third-party cookies (for those sites) and running most third-party requests with standard uBlock rules. I have yet other contexts (Chrome profiles) where Flash is enabled if I need that, then a separate browser for Java etc. I'd like to see these security levels built into browsers where the contexts are built around permissions and site trust rather than access to the user store (which is also important) I don't think it's realistic for most users to do this right now with profiles, as it requires a lot of discipline - it needs to be in the UI. Browsers have become as sophisticated as operating systems and we're accessing more and more of our personal data using them, yet the model of 'every site has access to everything' be it a site you trust, like Gmail, or a random URL you're clicking on - has somehow survived. It's the equivalent of the old days where everyone would run their local systems with an admin account for everything. I really think browsers need a rethink along these lines where websites are treated like apps and you can apply a trust group to each.
- TheDong 10y ago
  The firefox feature of `--no-remote -P` is the way to do that, which has existed since before the chrome browser did. Old feature. This feature is not meant to solve that use-case since if your case is security, you need separate browsers/contexts/proceses anyways. Separate profiles in firefox implement separate profiles (which may all be independently open side-by-side in different windows). This exchanges less secure/strong separation with better UX by intermingling. Firefox is just choosing to support either set of tradeoffs there.
  - mverwijs 10y ago
    Old perhaps, but userfriendly this is not.
StevePerkins 10y ago
Awesome. Coming up with legitimately innovative features and publicizing them will do more good than a dozen new logo campaigns.
teekert 10y ago
Nice, up until now I used Chrome as the browser logged into everything (fb, Twitter, Google) and FF as the main browser.
zyxzkz 10y ago
Been wanting something like this for years.
raimue 10y ago
Nice to see this integrated natively. I was using MultiFox before to get this functionality. For example, this allows me to manage multiple twitter accounts, without logging out and back in all the time.
espeed 10y ago
An official linux container tab with shell access (for dev, emacs, etc) would be a killer feature for Chromebooks.
drc0 10y ago
the thing I blame is that ctrl+t on a container opens a new tab of the default container and not the one that is currently on focus.
mozillauser2017 10y ago
I've been using the Private Tab addon to open separate logins in the same window for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/private-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/private-tab/
cpeterso 10y ago
How would you design a user interface for container tabs that non-technical users can understand? Something like container windows, isolating different browser windows instead of tabs, might be a clear way to visibly show the separation to the user. In one window, they can log into their work Gmail. In another window they can log into their personal Gmail without any Google cookie confusion.
liminal 10y ago
I like where this is heading but their pre-selected categories don't make sense. Container isolation should be based on security requirements rather than site content. E.g. shopping and banking have similar security requirements that are different than following a click-bait link on facebook. I'd like a container per Google account since trying to switch users in their apps is a disaster that forces me to run multiple browsers. I'd also like to tie sites to specific containers. So supposing Banking stays its own category, that should mean that any sites that open in the Banking container will never open in another container. Similarly it should be possible to whitelist a set of sites for a container so e.g. only specific banking sites will launch in the Banking container. Each container should have its own set of security permissions. I'd like to have disposable containers. I want a safe space where I can open a sketchy link and not have to worry about that page doing anything to the rest of my environment.
jagtesh 10y ago
This is a great idea! I love the fact that I can have both contexts in the same window. What would also be pretty cool is being able to move all windows in one context into a new window, if I want to separate things in a new OS workspace.
anigbrowl 10y ago
A welcome development, though long overdue. I don't understand why browser UI is so boring and unimaginative.
aplaice 10y ago
I don't want to be too greedy (considering that the presence of this feature on the desktop is already great), but is there any chance that this will be coming to Firefox for Android? It might be a challenge to implement this UX-wise; however, it would also be extremely helpful since it would help in isolating mobile "web-apps" while still using a decent browser (Firefox for Android instead of Chrome), especially as profiles, which exist on the desktop version of Firefox, are not available on Android. (Googling does not seem to have produced any relevant hits.)
_andromeda_ 10y ago
This is really good. I might actually find myself using FF more now. Chrome supports multiple profiles but it's quite tedious make the switch(you'd need to create multiple accounts). The best solution that I'd been using was opening an incognito session, regular session, guest session(easier than having multiple profiles but hardly sufficient when you want many more separate sessions). Edit: I love the color coding feature that distinguishes the distinct containers you have open.
WillyOnWheels 10y ago
another way to use chrome in a sandbox https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...
jedisct1 10y ago
This is really neat. I became a huge fan of Opera Neon's interface, though. And it would be a perfect fit for "containers". Drop icons into folders, and done. Folders represent containers.
nkkollaw 10y ago
It would be cool if there was a shortcut to hide all other tabs but a certain group. I would love if I could use this to organize my 100 tabs I always have open.
raphaelh 10y ago
There's a nice addon for Firefox, called Priv8: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/priv8/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/priv8/ This is a Firefox addon that uses part of the security model of Firefox OS to create sandboxed tabs. Each sandbox is a completely separated world: it doesn't share cookies, storage, and a lots of other stuff with the rest of Firefox, but just with other tabs from the same sandbox.

843 points by malikNF 10y ago

As a user, I actually just want my browser to contain less features. Vendors add and add and add features. If I want different user profiles, I already have many users on my OS - I just switch between them. When Chrome came out, I and many others switched to it just because it was lacking so many features. It was great!

nerdponx 10y ago
Having features is fine imo, as long as they can be disabled.
sp0rk 10y ago
So then use a browser whose stated goal is to be minimal. Container tabs are an amazing addition with great security and privacy benefits. If you think changing OS user profiles is comparable, you either don't fully understand the concept or you are way outside of the demographic of people that will use this.
altano 10y ago
Chrome actually already has this feature in the form of profiles. See the top-right icon.
- richardboegli 10y ago
  Yes it does and I have been using this. But it seems to be per window not tab. Unless I've missed something?
  - gtirloni 10y ago
    It's per window and it remembers the last profile used. I find it hard to manage as other apps will open links on the active window, which might be in the incorrect profile I want to use at that time. I like this new feature in Firefox. OS-level profiles being the slowest method, Chrome profiles being faster but with this annoyances (for me)... Firefox new container tabs look like a more lightweight/faster method for context separation.
  - arthurfm 10y ago
    > it seems to be per window not tab Chromium-based Ghost Browser [1] can do it per tab or tab group. It would be nice if Google implemented the same feature into Chrome since multiple profiles can be a hassle. [1] https://ghostbrowser.com https://ghostbrowser.com
    - richardboegli 10y ago
      This looks EXTREMELY interesting. Thanks for sharing.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Yeah, this is actually distinctly different from Chrome's profiles. Firefox does already have an equivalent to Chrome's profiles [0], so it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to implement this, if it wasn't different. [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
- hkjgkjy 10y ago
  It does, sadly!

grenoire 10y ago

I would love this feature and it would actually get me to switch to Firefox in a heartbeat. I'm currently using Chrome just because of the the (subjectively) better developer tools, but this is a feature that would make my life so much easier!

scrollaway 10y ago
Firefox tab management is lackluster compared to Chrome; container tabs won't change that :/ Every time I try using Firefox I pretty quickly hit the limitation on selecting tabs. Chrome lets you select tabs like files in a file manager: Shift click for ranges, ctrl+click for adding/removing single tabs. You can then drag & drop the group in or out of various windows, close all at once, etc. Container tabs imho won't be usable unless something like this is in place. When dealing with as few as 5+ tabs, I certainly wouldn't want to manually tweak them one at a time. Can't imagine for 20+, 50+. But the idea is nice for feature separation, I like that a lot.
- oblio 10y ago
  Firefox's default tab management might be worse than Chrome's, but once you add something like Tab Mix Plus into the mix, Chrome starts looking like a Ford Model T next to a Ferrari.
- iokanuon 10y ago
  Try the Tree Style Tab addon for Firefox. Managing 100+ tabs in Firefox is a breeze. I can't bring myself to use Chrome now.
  - richardboegli 10y ago
    Great minds think a like ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- richardboegli 10y ago

Tajnymag 10y ago

Lack of history separation seems quite pitty to me imo :-/

Sylos 10y ago
Well, that's not really the idea behind the feature. If you want that, you should work with different Firefox Profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

thewisenerd 10y ago

why isn't "Saved Passwords" and "Saved Search and Form data" separated between containers? There have been autofill/form-data attacks in the past[0] and there was a story recently on HN's front page showing the same[1]. I'd like to point out that mozilla already has a configuration option to disable form data saving on https sites, 'browser.formfill.saveHttpsForms'. Why?[2] > Right; the idea is to eliminate "opportunism". If my laptop is stolen, Firefox's current behavior makes it easy for a thief to find a https: site in my history, go to it, check out, and then just let autocomplete hand them my complete credit card details. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171547 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252486 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252486

Timshel 10y ago
Probably because of usability, they are still exploring how to integrate it in the browser (it will probably stay hidden behind a pref for a while). Right now no configuration screen is aware of the container feature.
- masklinn 10y ago
  Yeah usability is a toughie, an other feature I'd be interested in would be some sort of container inheritance (e.g. sub-identities in a work context when clients provide office 365 identities or to test projects under different identities all within the broader work context) but that's even harder to make easy to use.
wilde 10y ago
If the attacker has physical access to your machine, you have bigger problems. They can just read the autofill DB at that point.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
I also wish it was toggable to make history dependant on a container. My personal history will likely grow and have too much garbage, it would be nice to wipe it and have it not affect my work container.

sirn 10y ago

This looks amazing! I have been using Self-Destructing Cookies[1] for few years and while I think the extension is great, I always feel there's not enough isolation between tabs. For example, if I have Twitter logged in in one tab, and other tab contain Twitter button, then the other tab can still have access to my Twitter cookie. (Because Twitter tab is still active, so SDC would not destroy the cookie.) I know this is solvable using tracker blocker, but something like SDC but worked on tab container level would be very welcomed. (Other side effect of using SDC is I seems to get the harder ReCAPTCHA that make you click an object until all of it disappear, with new ones popping up after clicking. Usually took about 5-10 clicks. Very annoying.) [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

edgartaor 10y ago
You may want to try uMatrix[1]. It block any 3rd party content by default (cookies, scripts,...) . So Twitter buttons (and similar) do not load by default, but you can allow it with two clicks. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
- sirn 10y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, although I'm already using uMatrix :-) SDC + uMatrix do make a really great combination, and I'm really glad I use these extensions when I see some sites loading 10+ trackers that are not relevant to site's function at all.

altano 10y ago

This is awesome. Microsoft's identity system is a nightmare so switching between my Office 365 email account and my OneDrive/music accounts is always annoying. I'd love to be able to contain each and stay logged in to both accounts. At work I test lots of user accounts on the same site and make heavy use of Chrome profiles for that. This would fill a similar role. But while I'm glad to have them, no average user would ever understand any of these concepts as presented in these screenshots.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

This would be nice for using more than one Twitter account without needing to open one in private browsing (TweetDeck exists, and I do use it, but I prefer Twitter Web). I hope it makes it to the release channel.

JohnBooty 10y ago

I am a Mozilla supporter and FF is my "daily driver" browser. Very interested in this feature. Chrome has had it for a years, and it's a killer feature for many developers. It's very very useful to have multiple browser windows open, each logged into the same site as a different user. A lot of people do this by opening multiple browsers (FF, Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc) but that has its limits and it just adds another variable my poor brain would prefer not to handle. Also very useful for home/work separation. One browser account for work and one for home. And also maybe one for porn. So that when you're screensharing in a meeting and you type a URL into the browser, you don't get autocomplete suggestions for your favorite porn sites popping up. Happened to an old (married) boss of mine once while displaying his screen on the projector... typed "a" into the URL field and the browser helpfully suggested he navigate to AdultFriendFinder. Right in front of some clients. :) Firefox's "container tabs" implementation may be slightly confusing. Chrome's implementation is dead simple. One identity per window, and the identity name is always displayed in the upper right. With FF's container tabs, I'll have one identity per tab, and I can see they're color coded, but that means I'll have to mentally map colors to identities. It's more flexible than Chrome's implementation but there's more cognitive overhead involved. Also, what's up with the name "container tabs?" That tells me nothing about what they do. All tabs... contain things. I think they need to rename it to "identity tabs" or something. How on Earth would anybody ever guess that "container tabs" is related to identities and data sharing? We'll see how it plays out though. I'm excited to try it and I am continually grateful for Mozilla's efforts. In fact this reminds me I haven't donated to them in a while....

rcthompson 10y ago
Edit: I guess I'm misremembering how Chrome works, or maybe they changed it since I've last used Chrome seriously. I'll leave the comment so the replies make sense. Original comment: I'm kind of surprised that Mozilla went with a per-tab approach here, since they went with per-window for private browsing (while Chrome did the opposite: per-tab private browsing and per-window profiles).
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  That's not right. Chrome's incognito mode is per window.

therealmarv 10y ago

Tech question: Does Firefox has technical process seperation of tabs nowdays? This is one of the main features of Chrome since 1.0 and just want to know if Firefox has something similar finally.

alkonaut 10y ago
It's in a sort of alpha state I believe. Will be a while until it rolls out to everyone.
ec109685 10y ago
Chrome groups multiple tabs into the same process.
Sylos 10y ago
The foundational work is there, it's currently still going through testing, although you can already manually enable it and it works rather well, but as of right now it's not planned to have complete separation for each individual tab, as that just chews up a lot of resources with relatively little gain in performance. What's planned instead, is to use a set number of processes across all tabs. So, if this would be two processes, then every other tab will share a process with one another. And they'll probably have around 5 processes for tabs at a maximum once this is fully rolled out, at least for the foreseeable future. You can manually change this maximum number of processes in about:config, though. And if you do set it to something like 500, i.e. just a very big number that you're not likely to hit in number of tabs, then it will separate each tab into its own process, with whatever performance problems come with that.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  The about:config pref to control the number of content processes shared by tabs is "dom.ipc.processCount".
- therealmarv 10y ago
  Thank you for this extensive reply! :)

alkonaut 10y ago

Why do I even need this? Isn't it by default so that site1.com can't see cookies from site2.com for example?

jakobegger 10y ago
The problem is when site1.com is Twitter, and site2.com includes a Twitter button, then Twitter can see that you are browsing site2.com
- alkonaut 10y ago
  Ok - I'm happy to break all such functionality by refusing the use of those cookies. I'm almost sure Ghostery already does this. Is there no legit/useful use for this (I don't count fb auth or like/tweet buttons)?
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    Ghostery blocks specific well known trackers. An approach like Container Tabs would prevent these types of tracking in principle. Valid use for 3rd party cookies is something like single sign on. (Eg. sign into all Google services at the same time, even though they use separate domains)
  - 0xffff2 10y ago
    All you have to do to block this is disable third party cookies. I did this years ago and for my usage I've never even noticed.
Too 10y ago
site1.com might include embedded images that are hosted by site2.com, so may site3.com, site4.com, site5.com and site6.com Now site2.com (aka facebook like button) knows that you have visited both site1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. You can work around this in some ways by disabling "third party cookies" but this breaks certain features, such as using your facebook identity to post comments on other sites, so sadly all browsers enable this by default.

znpy 10y ago

I've been doing this for years using both Firefox' and Thunderbird's multiple-profile features. Just run "firefox --no-remote -ProfileManager" and here you go. So the serious question is: how is this any different from using multiple profile? Multiple profile also have the pro/con that they are actual different processes, so there's no information leak between profiles whatsoever (well, unless some serious hacking happens). Edit: being different processes with different profiles, they also have different configuration folders, different cookie sets, different password storage locations etc...

giancarlostoro 10y ago
I was using ParrotSec OS for a few months and it had this as the default for opening Firefox, it would prompt you to ask which profile you wanted to use, it was somewhat handy. Firefox can be set to always open the profile manager on startup by default. But what they're saying now is per tab vs per window.
drinkjuice 10y ago
+1, and I would like to add: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/change-window-icons/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/change-window-ic... To answer your question, it's probably quicker and takes up less HD space :) And now we can have profiles and container tabs in those profiles, or just use profiles or just use container tabs, how cool is that.
- znpy 10y ago
  > And now we can have profiles and container tabs in those profiles Yo Dawg! We heard you like profiles, so we put profiles in your profiles so you can use profiles while you use profiles!
  - Sylos 10y ago
    I actually have a use-case for this. I have a "webdev"-profile where I've got none of my usual webpage-breaking privacy extensions, I do have Tree Style Tabs there, because when coding I tend to open a ton of tabs, and well, then I use the Container Tabs, since I need to be able to see my webpage as logged-out user, as logged-in user etc.

muddysky 10y ago

Slightly OT: This page reads like Mozilla's Developer Network (MDN) online documentation, I had to read the first sentences few times until I got what container tabs are about. However, very nice feature.

Manishearth 10y ago
That's because it's on the Mozilla wiki. I'd expect better docs on the support site (and maybe MDN) once the feature nears completion/release. The mozilla wiki contains all kinds of odds and ends about random ongoing projects (status, documentation) and is mostly developer-facing.

rlpb 10y ago

I would like to be able to configure my browser to open every URL in a domain-specific "container", unless I say otherwise. Say site www.a.org includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, and www.evilcorp.org sets a cookie. When I then go to www.b.org and it includes an image from www.evilcorp.org, I don't expect the cookie to be sent back. In other words, the cookie should be tied to www.a.org, even though it actually came from www.evilcorp.org. It should only be sent if my URL bar says www.a.org AND the image is coming from www.evilcorp.org. I feel that this is how browsers should have been designed in the first place. I welcome this Container Tabs feature, but I don't think it quite goes far enough to restore my privacy.

chii 10y ago
how would you do oauth (or openid style login) with this then?
- rlpb 10y ago
  I would be happy to whitelist the sites with which I use oauth/openid to log in. If I didn't, it would still work; I'd just have to reauthenticate once for every site.
  - bwilliams18 10y ago
    you could even just whitelist oauth/openid to work across all sites.
- diafygi 10y ago
  Nitpick: OAuth doesn't require cookies. You can track someone through the state parameter in the redirect url.
oftenwrong 10y ago
I generally disable third party cookies. Causes very few problems ime.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
As someone else intimated, isn't that just disabling 3rd party cookies, which has been a browser feature for ages?

nmy 10y ago

This is why I'm using Firefox nightly. It is a killer feature to keep open my many AWS and GCP accounts (one container per client). It still needs to be polished though.

chrisper 10y ago

This is pretty awesome. Very useful. My school's security is a joke. You cannot log out except by closing your browser. The session also never expires. Not only that, but now they moved to a "single-sign on." If I sign in on one app, it signs me in for all apps.

lmedinas 10y ago

Anyone know when this feature is planned to hit Beta or Stable ?

Sylos 10y ago
Do you mean officially considered beta/stable quality or just that it's there in the Beta or Stable version, so that you don't have to migrate to a less stable version of Firefox in order to use it? If it's the latter, there's two preferences that you can flip in about:config to enable it (even in Firefox Stable): privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled Mind though that since this feature is currently still under active development, that it might actually be less error-prone in the normally less stable versions of Firefox.
- lmedinas 10y ago
  This is why I ask when it will be enabled by default on Beta or Release. Any idea when is planned ?
  - malikNF 10y ago
    This is available on Firefox Nightly.

jbverschoor 10y ago

I'm long searching for a solution to do this is a much broader way.. On the OS level. Private Work A Work B Work C Ideally it would seem like a different user. (Filesystem, cmd-tab). But easily accessible like the three finger swipe. Fast user switching doesn't cut it. I even tried logging in on my local machine using VNC or remove desktop.. Is having 4 VMs the only way?

lorenzk 10y ago
Qubes OS does exactly this: www.qubes-os.org
chowells 10y ago
Have you considered https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/? It's not exactly what you're asking, but it has similarities.
beagle3 10y ago
On Linux, you just set up another user and it's one "sudo" command away. Long time ago (win2000, before XP)I tried to do it on windows with the "runas" command, but things like IE would keep popping up with the wrong user (they managed to communicate with the desktop and have that open the new window) so it wasn't a good solution. Perhaps it is better now.
Sylos 10y ago
Yet another potential solution, if you're on Linux. This is more on the accessible side of things, it doesn't do separation as much as you would like it: KDE Plasma has what they call "Activities". In its basic idea, it's kind of like fancy desktop workspaces. So, it does separate your windows into workspace-like groups, but you can also set what files and widgets are displayed on the desktop on a per-Activity basis. So, you don't have a different filesystem, but you can have a folder or multiple folders displayed on each Activity's desktop. Also, shortcuts to different applications, including for example Firefox profiles, as well as different sets of widgets, for example I like to use the little post-it note widgets to write things down on. And yeah, with that you can then just switch between Activities via a simple keyboard shortcut or by clicking an Activity-selector on your panel (if you've put one there).

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago

not needed if you're running Qubes-OS :)

j_s 10y ago

I use the Qupzilla browser incognito mode which is a separate session per-window by default. It uses the Chrome guts and has a few rough edges.

x1798DE 10y ago

Right now, what I'm doing is that all my standard browsing happens on Firefox, with uMatrix blocking JS and just generally locked down. For anything where I want to log in or have a persistent identity (stackoverflow, gmail, etc), I set up separate Chrome profiles and manually open each site in the appropriate profile. Honestly, this whole thing is a bit of a pain - my ideal solution would be one where I can set up "domain groups" matching on the URL in the URL bar, each fully isolated from one another (different extensions, settings, caches, histories, forms, cookie stores, etc), and clicking links that go from one profile to another, all referer information is stripped out. Anything not matching one of the domain groups would go to the "default session" (which I would configure to be completely locked down and ephemeral). Additionally, I'd want a context-menu item "Open link in group <x>", which would open something matching another domain group in the domain group of my choice, so that I could do things like visit gmail in two different groups.

echelon 10y ago
Context based on domains sounds like a perfect and elegant solution. I hope someone from Mozilla is reading this.
- _dark_matter_ 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure about 90% of us Mozilla engineers are on hacker news :)
- Touche 10y ago
  Not really, many people have both work and personal gmail accounts, for example. Contexts are not based on domains.
SonicSoul 10y ago
hmm so you can log into multiple profiles at once in chrome and have them run under separate session spaces? i found that i can have on session space in regular chrome and one more in incognito, but all tabs in incognito seem to share that same session. i.e. opening a new tab automatically shares the same session as the other tabs in x domain. Maybe there is a way to control this behavior?

hosh 10y ago

Cool. I had been using multifox plugin for testing websites, but it won't work with the new multiprocess engine and the plugin author had no intention of porting it. Glad to see an alternative. I use Firefox for testing my dev work but reading about the privacy use-case, I might seriously consider switching from Chrome as my main browser.

newscracker 10y ago

This is really awesome!!! I used to manage this kind of separation by using private windows and using different browsers. I don't really want to manage these by window or create user profiles, as may be the case in other browsers.

nikcub 10y ago

This is a neat idea but it doesn't implement the main reason I use separate profiles in Chromium - different security contexts based on how much you trust a site. Example: my main general browsing profile has flash, PDFs and all plugins disabled, absolutely all handlers switched off, all hardware access off, WebGL switched off, no account logins and uBlock Origin set to aggressively block most third-party requests. My second most used context is for personal sites I login for - with access to third-party cookies (for those sites) and running most third-party requests with standard uBlock rules. I have yet other contexts (Chrome profiles) where Flash is enabled if I need that, then a separate browser for Java etc. I'd like to see these security levels built into browsers where the contexts are built around permissions and site trust rather than access to the user store (which is also important) I don't think it's realistic for most users to do this right now with profiles, as it requires a lot of discipline - it needs to be in the UI. Browsers have become as sophisticated as operating systems and we're accessing more and more of our personal data using them, yet the model of 'every site has access to everything' be it a site you trust, like Gmail, or a random URL you're clicking on - has somehow survived. It's the equivalent of the old days where everyone would run their local systems with an admin account for everything. I really think browsers need a rethink along these lines where websites are treated like apps and you can apply a trust group to each.

TheDong 10y ago
The firefox feature of `--no-remote -P` is the way to do that, which has existed since before the chrome browser did. Old feature. This feature is not meant to solve that use-case since if your case is security, you need separate browsers/contexts/proceses anyways. Separate profiles in firefox implement separate profiles (which may all be independently open side-by-side in different windows). This exchanges less secure/strong separation with better UX by intermingling. Firefox is just choosing to support either set of tradeoffs there.
- mverwijs 10y ago
  Old perhaps, but userfriendly this is not.

StevePerkins 10y ago

Awesome. Coming up with legitimately innovative features and publicizing them will do more good than a dozen new logo campaigns.

teekert 10y ago

Nice, up until now I used Chrome as the browser logged into everything (fb, Twitter, Google) and FF as the main browser.

zyxzkz 10y ago

Been wanting something like this for years.

raimue 10y ago

Nice to see this integrated natively. I was using MultiFox before to get this functionality. For example, this allows me to manage multiple twitter accounts, without logging out and back in all the time.

espeed 10y ago

An official linux container tab with shell access (for dev, emacs, etc) would be a killer feature for Chromebooks.

drc0 10y ago

the thing I blame is that ctrl+t on a container opens a new tab of the default container and not the one that is currently on focus.

mozillauser2017 10y ago

I've been using the Private Tab addon to open separate logins in the same window for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/private-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/private-tab/

cpeterso 10y ago

How would you design a user interface for container tabs that non-technical users can understand? Something like container windows, isolating different browser windows instead of tabs, might be a clear way to visibly show the separation to the user. In one window, they can log into their work Gmail. In another window they can log into their personal Gmail without any Google cookie confusion.

liminal 10y ago

I like where this is heading but their pre-selected categories don't make sense. Container isolation should be based on security requirements rather than site content. E.g. shopping and banking have similar security requirements that are different than following a click-bait link on facebook. I'd like a container per Google account since trying to switch users in their apps is a disaster that forces me to run multiple browsers. I'd also like to tie sites to specific containers. So supposing Banking stays its own category, that should mean that any sites that open in the Banking container will never open in another container. Similarly it should be possible to whitelist a set of sites for a container so e.g. only specific banking sites will launch in the Banking container. Each container should have its own set of security permissions. I'd like to have disposable containers. I want a safe space where I can open a sketchy link and not have to worry about that page doing anything to the rest of my environment.

jagtesh 10y ago

This is a great idea! I love the fact that I can have both contexts in the same window. What would also be pretty cool is being able to move all windows in one context into a new window, if I want to separate things in a new OS workspace.

anigbrowl 10y ago

A welcome development, though long overdue. I don't understand why browser UI is so boring and unimaginative.

aplaice 10y ago

I don't want to be too greedy (considering that the presence of this feature on the desktop is already great), but is there any chance that this will be coming to Firefox for Android? It might be a challenge to implement this UX-wise; however, it would also be extremely helpful since it would help in isolating mobile "web-apps" while still using a decent browser (Firefox for Android instead of Chrome), especially as profiles, which exist on the desktop version of Firefox, are not available on Android. (Googling does not seem to have produced any relevant hits.)

_andromeda_ 10y ago

This is really good. I might actually find myself using FF more now. Chrome supports multiple profiles but it's quite tedious make the switch(you'd need to create multiple accounts). The best solution that I'd been using was opening an incognito session, regular session, guest session(easier than having multiple profiles but hardly sufficient when you want many more separate sessions). Edit: I love the color coding feature that distinguishes the distinct containers you have open.

WillyOnWheels 10y ago

another way to use chrome in a sandbox https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/ https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...

jedisct1 10y ago

This is really neat. I became a huge fan of Opera Neon's interface, though. And it would be a perfect fit for "containers". Drop icons into folders, and done. Folders represent containers.

nkkollaw 10y ago

It would be cool if there was a shortcut to hide all other tabs but a certain group. I would love if I could use this to organize my 100 tabs I always have open.

raphaelh 10y ago

There's a nice addon for Firefox, called Priv8: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/priv8/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/priv8/ This is a Firefox addon that uses part of the security model of Firefox OS to create sandboxed tabs. Each sandbox is a completely separated world: it doesn't share cookies, storage, and a lots of other stuff with the rest of Firefox, but just with other tabs from the same sandbox.