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I just want to have my tabs stop talking to other tabs and their resources / cookies / caches / spyware / tentacles. Every tab should be a VM. I am willing to p

I just want to have my tabs stop talking to other tabs and their resources / cookies / caches / spyware / tentacles. Every tab should be a VM. I am willing to pay a significant performance penalty to achieve that. I have a password manager, and I'm 100% OK with having to sign-in for every tab as well. I'm surprised no browser vendor actually ever tried that.

sebazzz 8y ago
Tab or website as part of a tab? The latter is the only way cookies will never be shared.
jMyles 8y ago
Hear hear. Can somebody speak to the challenges of such a scheme? I also really like this idea. Even for cases where I'm cool with tabs sharing state, I want to opt-in to that and be reminded with some kind of color-coding or something.
- swozey 8y ago
  This is how Firefox container tabs work. I have several color coded tabs like Work, Personal, Gmail2, etc. It lets me use my personal Gmail in its own orange tabs then the blue tabs are my work gmail. It's made dealing with gcloud/aws and different logins for the same portals way better than my previous Chrome workflow of having different profiles I had to switch between. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
  - __jonas 8y ago
    I tried to do this but I can't figure out a fast workflow to achieve this. I hate having to do the extra steps long-pressing the new tab button every single time and then selecting the container type (same scenario of two gmail accounts so I can't "open in container by default"), I wish there was just an url prefix or something to open in a specific container so I could just create a bookmark for each gmail. I'm curious what your workflow is like, do you just always keep both tabs open?
joecot 8y ago
Just in case you're unaware, you've seen Container Tabs, right? Now exactly what you want, but a pretty big step towards it. Containers are built-in; this extension adds the interface for showing it per tab. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Yeah, I know it's a big step towards it. But it's not tab isolation — what I want is a container for every tab by default. In other words, if you can think of containerising a website as a blacklist, I don't want a blacklist, I want a whitelist, everything should be containerised by default on every tab.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    You could almost certainly build this as an extension if you wanted to. It's basically what the "Facebook Container" extension does, except that extension only does it for facebook.com.
    - erinnh 8y ago
      There are extensions for this. Temporary Container (for temporary sites)+Multi-Account Container (for sites you want to allow to keep cookies etc)
  - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... Doesn't this already do it?
- rsync 8y ago
  "Just in case you're unaware, you've seen Container Tabs, right? Now exactly what you want, but a pretty big step towards it." Container tabs are better than nothing but what I have been wishing for for years is the ability to chroot jail a GUI application. There would be very little performance penalty (vs. a full VM for each browser) since you aren't emulating the entire machine - it's just a chroot. The idea is that in addition to their own root store of cookies/metadata/history/etc., each browser container could have its own IP address. I don't want to just keep my banking tab from talking to my throwaway-gmail-account tab - I want them to operate on different networks. You can do this right now, with significant performance penalty, by running a full blown VM for each browser. There should be a way to run a GUI app in a chroot jail, but displaying to the same display. EDIT: In fact, I have lamented this not existing for so many years I think I will have rsync.net fund it...
asadotzler 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... and friends gets you some of the way there.
untog 8y ago
> I'm 100% OK with having to sign-in for every tab as well I think this is the reason why people haven't done it. Most users don't want that, because it means that if you open any link in a new tab in any kind of signed in environment it'll fail. In an ideal world opening a link and opening in a new tab are functionally equivalent except for the "new tab" part. A middle ground I'd like is for the Firefox containers function to allow you to automatically create a container for each domain you visit. That way, all the tabs I have for my logged in site will be logged in, but won't share state with anything else.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Now I'm thinking that integrating Tree Style Tab with containers could be a good way to control them; each root tab would be its own container, and children would automatically open in it.
  - bostonvaulter2 8y ago
    It would be interesting to have non-tab nodes in the Tree Style Tab tree. Some of the them could be persistent and some of them could be temporary (e.g. for a new rabbit hole you're mapping)
ChrisGranger 8y ago
There's a setting in about:config that can help with this: privacy.firstparty.isolate set to true. It's also available as an add-on to make switching it on and off easier, if you prefer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-isolation/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-i...
43920 8y ago
It's not exactly the same, but first-party isolation [1] sounds like it would be pretty similar. [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-isolation-in-firefox/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-...
fxfan 8y ago
Today is your lucky day. There is a Firefox add on called temp container (or temporary container) that is built on top of "regular" containers that does EXACTLY what you want.

sebazzz 8y ago

Tab or website as part of a tab? The latter is the only way cookies will never be shared.

jMyles 8y ago

Hear hear. Can somebody speak to the challenges of such a scheme? I also really like this idea. Even for cases where I'm cool with tabs sharing state, I want to opt-in to that and be reminded with some kind of color-coding or something.

swozey 8y ago
This is how Firefox container tabs work. I have several color coded tabs like Work, Personal, Gmail2, etc. It lets me use my personal Gmail in its own orange tabs then the blue tabs are my work gmail. It's made dealing with gcloud/aws and different logins for the same portals way better than my previous Chrome workflow of having different profiles I had to switch between. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- __jonas 8y ago
  I tried to do this but I can't figure out a fast workflow to achieve this. I hate having to do the extra steps long-pressing the new tab button every single time and then selecting the container type (same scenario of two gmail accounts so I can't "open in container by default"), I wish there was just an url prefix or something to open in a specific container so I could just create a bookmark for each gmail. I'm curious what your workflow is like, do you just always keep both tabs open?

joecot 8y ago

Just in case you're unaware, you've seen Container Tabs, right? Now exactly what you want, but a pretty big step towards it. Containers are built-in; this extension adds the interface for showing it per tab. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

rolleiflex 8y ago
Yeah, I know it's a big step towards it. But it's not tab isolation — what I want is a container for every tab by default. In other words, if you can think of containerising a website as a blacklist, I don't want a blacklist, I want a whitelist, everything should be containerised by default on every tab.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  You could almost certainly build this as an extension if you wanted to. It's basically what the "Facebook Container" extension does, except that extension only does it for facebook.com.
  - erinnh 8y ago
    There are extensions for this. Temporary Container (for temporary sites)+Multi-Account Container (for sites you want to allow to keep cookies etc)
- NikolaeVarius 8y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... Doesn't this already do it?
rsync 8y ago
"Just in case you're unaware, you've seen Container Tabs, right? Now exactly what you want, but a pretty big step towards it." Container tabs are better than nothing but what I have been wishing for for years is the ability to chroot jail a GUI application. There would be very little performance penalty (vs. a full VM for each browser) since you aren't emulating the entire machine - it's just a chroot. The idea is that in addition to their own root store of cookies/metadata/history/etc., each browser container could have its own IP address. I don't want to just keep my banking tab from talking to my throwaway-gmail-account tab - I want them to operate on different networks. You can do this right now, with significant performance penalty, by running a full blown VM for each browser. There should be a way to run a GUI app in a chroot jail, but displaying to the same display. EDIT: In fact, I have lamented this not existing for so many years I think I will have rsync.net fund it...

asadotzler 8y ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... and friends gets you some of the way there.

untog 8y ago

> I'm 100% OK with having to sign-in for every tab as well I think this is the reason why people haven't done it. Most users don't want that, because it means that if you open any link in a new tab in any kind of signed in environment it'll fail. In an ideal world opening a link and opening in a new tab are functionally equivalent except for the "new tab" part. A middle ground I'd like is for the Firefox containers function to allow you to automatically create a container for each domain you visit. That way, all the tabs I have for my logged in site will be logged in, but won't share state with anything else.

icebraining 8y ago
Now I'm thinking that integrating Tree Style Tab with containers could be a good way to control them; each root tab would be its own container, and children would automatically open in it.
- bostonvaulter2 8y ago
  It would be interesting to have non-tab nodes in the Tree Style Tab tree. Some of the them could be persistent and some of them could be temporary (e.g. for a new rabbit hole you're mapping)

ChrisGranger 8y ago

There's a setting in about:config that can help with this: privacy.firstparty.isolate set to true. It's also available as an add-on to make switching it on and off easier, if you prefer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-isolation/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/first-party-i...

43920 8y ago

It's not exactly the same, but first-party isolation [1] sounds like it would be pretty similar. [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-isolation-in-firefox/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/22/how-to-enable-first-party-...

fxfan 8y ago

Today is your lucky day. There is a Firefox add on called temp container (or temporary container) that is built on top of "regular" containers that does EXACTLY what you want.