15 ms·

Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

226 points by cassepipe 5y ago

tusqasi 5y ago
This seems to be down
cmeacham98 5y ago
Alternative low-effort solution that might break some websites (only issue I've run into so far is U2F based 2FA with Duo): privacy.firstparty.isolate -> true (in about:config) Effectively acts as a separate 'container' for every website.
- syshum 5y ago
  The problem here comes in when you have things like SSO where many sites auth to Google, or AzureAD, etc. With Continers I can login to the same site with mutiple accounts, for example one common use it where you have a Admin Account, and a Regular Account. You can use FireFox Containers to access the same site(s) using different accounts I also do this with Amazon, so I can have my Work Amazon, and my personal Amazon separated with out having to use the "Change Account" feature which I find to be annoying
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    Yeah, I agree there are definitely usecases containers address that FPI doesn't. However, if your use case is just "I don't want Facebook and friends to track me across websites", you should give FPI a try!
konradkpl 5y ago
Firefox Containers is a great feature that deserves more credits. This feature allows us to avoid tracking, while at the same time ensuring the convenience of use and does not require the user to change their habits. Do you want to limit facebook? Create the container, set the default facebook.com opening in it, and use the browser as before. This should be a standard feature in any browser.
- freediver 5y ago
  Not a container user so I hope you don't mind me asking, how is this different to opening facebook in new private tab/window? Is the convenience in the act of automatically opening it in container if you type in facebook.com or follow a link to it?
  - scotu 5y ago
    what you mention is one advantage, another example is that you are not limited to 2 contexts (private tab & non-private tab vs as many containers as you need). Related to the advantage you mention is also the reverse: clicking a non-facebook link from the facebook container can (if you want) open a non-facebook container
    - freediver 5y ago
      Ok starting to understand it. Seems like something I would have a hard time explaining to a non-tech person.
      - scotu 5y ago
        yes, you could describe that use case as "quarantining" websites in short, but I'd say it's a power user feature if managed manually. If you install the "facebook container" extension, it's zero conf but it's only for facebook. Another use case I saw users being interested in, is you have 2 (or more) accounts on a website and you can login in both at the same time in 2 separate containers (you cannot quarantine the website to the container in this use case because you need to open it in multiple containers). You can do that with incognito, but the second one is very temporary as closing the browser is going to log you out.
        freediver 5y ago
        So compared to a private tab, you basically get persistence and some form of organization (containers also act as groups). How important is to have tabs from different containers in the same window?
super_mario 5y ago
Are containers still necessary? Does the Firefox built in privacy (Strict privacy protection policy) provide same or similar functionality?
- msdrigg 5y ago
  I use containers to only use some google services while signed in. For instance I use gmail signed in but I google search in a separate container to not log that data in my account. I may be fooling myself and google can identify it anyway through my IP or something but it feels like I get a little extra anonymity.
  - abacadaba 5y ago
    duckduckgo is a thing, just sayin
    - kashug 5y ago
      But the search is not as good. Or good might be subjective in this case. But I tried using DDG mutliple times, but every time I end up just doing the same search on google becouse it is much better at giving me the result I want. But this is just my personal experience.
    - msdrigg 5y ago
      I use ddg primarily, but I regularly need to use g! to reroute myself to Google when searching for anything that I don’t already have domain-specific knowledge for. Like if I want to just check syntax for a new programming language, ddg can handle the search just fine, but if I am doing initial research for a problem I don’t understand well, I need Google to get consistently relevant results.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Those are for different things. I use containers to log in to the same website with different accounts without having to switch browsers or open a new window. E.g., since Discord still doesn't support switching accounts in the year of our lord 2021, I have a container set up for the discord account I use for IRL stuff, and my personal account logged into the "vanilla" container. I can keep both discord tabs open side by side and get notifications from both. Even for websites that allow switching accounts, I prefer to use containers especially if the accounts go across different "domains" of my life. If I must log in to something personal at work or vice versa, I generally use a container for that to keep them separate.
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
One downside that I had hoped containers would fix was multiple accounts on AWS. Because of the way AWS handles the URL's for logging in I get: company1.signin.aws.amazon.com company2.signin.aws.amazon.com company3.signin.aws.amazon.com BUT FF only seems to remember the login/password for 1 of these at a time. I had hoped that putting them all in different containers would fix this but it appears that FF only matches based on the base domain name, and not the full sub-domain. If AWS had the domains structured as: AWS.com/company1 AWS.com/company2 AWS.com/company3 It might behave differently.
- mech422 5y ago
  I use different profiles for that... basically, I have multiple Firefox shortcuts, each using a different profile. You can also use containers with the profile to segregate things even more.
  - anonymousab 5y ago
    I wish Firefox had better (chrome-level) support for containers. There's various small QoL things that add up to make them a much more usable feature. At the very least, exposing them via webextension APIs would let developers take care of it themselves.
    - commoner 5y ago
      While Firefox doesn't have WebExtension APIs for browser profiles, the Profile Switcher for Firefox extension uses a separately installed connector binary to add a profile switcher (similar to Chrome's) in Firefox. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472
- Link512 5y ago
  Have you considered using a password manager? With 1Password I'm able to save all logins for my AWS accounts and then just select the appropriate one when logging in.
detritus 5y ago
Containers are great! But since the recent v.91 update screwed the tabs up so much, there's no quick visual way to scan and see which container-type each tab is. Great stuff, well done Mozilla! What's the point in being able to customise a container's appearance, including colour, if they're not described on the tab itself?
- syshum 5y ago
  TreeStyleTabs... next to Containers, it is the only reason I still use FF, if FF drops support for either TreeStyleTabs or Containers there will be zero reason for me to continue using it.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    Sideberry is TST with better perfomance, FYI. Also, right there with ya - treed tabs is the only reason I stick with FF.
    - BlackLotus89 5y ago
      Better performance not necessarily, but you can set custom rules for containers. You can set the user agent and proxy settings on a container base which is nice
      - generalizations 5y ago
        Firefox used to freeze up periodically when I used TST, and that went away when I switched. That's all I meant.
        BlackLotus89 5y ago
        Yup went away from TST for the same reason. Made a performance comparison a few weeks ago to compare sidebery with TST (I got a few thousand open tabs, spread over ~50 windows) and didn't get the perfomance penalty I used to. Side note: some plugins "crashed" when testing TST, sidebery and tab stash at the same time. Sidebery seemed to be the most stable. (had at one time no adblock anymore so that's something) Side note 2: I really like some things about sidebery for instance the grouping of tabs and the possibility to see your bookmarks. TST needs to be extended through plugins for this, but some functionality is really only available in certain plugins. Side note 3: The tab handling of sidebery and TST feels quite different... If you are used to the normal tab handling you will be confused with sidebery... a lot (you can reconfigure it to be more vanilla, but I had multiple problems configuring the plugins). The tab switching isn't at all obvious at times. All in all I would recommend everyone to play around with containers and vertical tabs :) I know this little rant here went on a huge tangent from the article, but I wanted to clarify my experience with the named plugins.
amphitheatre 5y ago
One issue I have when using containers is that if I have a non-containerised tab and I click a link in it that leads to Twitter, which I have a container for, a new tab opens in the container, but the current tab also switches to a Twitter tab with the click, clobbering my session/history. Is this a bug or conflict with another setting or add-on?
- tsjq 5y ago
  this doesn't happen for me. what's the other add-ons you have ?
  - amphitheatre 5y ago
    I have things like CanvasBlocker, uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, etc, and disabled third-party cookies. But nothing that should actively interfere with it. wrt containers, I have Multi-Account Containers, Containerise, and Temporary Containers. It happens every time I go to a URL that has an associated container I've made (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc). I might try resetting my container plugins to see if I can clear it.
  - amphitheatre 5y ago
    Fixed it. Containerise has a separate "Keep old tabs" setting that is different to the Multi-Account Containers "Replace tab" functionality. It works as intended now. Horray!
    - tsjq 5y ago
      That's nice. thanks for sharing
mech422 5y ago
Don't forget, you can still use multiple profiles. I have multiple shortcuts setup, each starting FF with a different profile. Within a profile, I use containers to further partition things. edit: for instance, I have a 'banking' profile with containers for each bank, brokerage, etc. The profile is totally separate from my 'general browsing' profile, so nothing can be sniffed. And the containers allow me to partition off each service
- extra88 5y ago
  What benefit do you get from starting another Firefox instance with a different profile compared to simply using a different container in the same instance?
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    Different profiles can have different extensions, so if you don't fully trust some extension you can isolate it to a given profile.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Also different bookmarks and different histories.
  - pavon 5y ago
    The ability to configure browser and extension settings differently for different profiles, plus different history/cookie for each. This is nice for experimenting with changes to umatrix settings without having results "pollute" my long-lived container storage. Also nice as a relief valve for when I don't won't to deal with my locked-down default settings, and just want to open up a site with everything enabled in a temporary container that gets blown away when I'm done.
- scns 5y ago
  Good idea, i opened a private window with all extensions disabled for banking and closed the normal window. Like your solution even more.
thrwawy283 5y ago
The real gem is this extension: Temporary Containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... Basically every new tab is a new temporary container. Isolation all the time, by default. It's an added exercise for the reader, but you have to go into the settings of the extension and modify some of the mouse behavior. Basically if I want a link I click to share the same container as the parent, I Ctrl + Click. Left-clicking or middle-clicking is always a new temporary container. Containers are so much more than cookie isolation.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  I add Containerize to that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise It lets you define rules for URLs to allow any URL matching a pattern to always open in a certain container.
  - c1yd3i 5y ago
    How is this different than managing the site list for a Firefox Container? Just that it's a CSV and patterns are supported? Do you just not define anything in the Firefox Container site list, and rely on this to manage it instead?
    - nsomaru 5y ago
      For me a source of some frustration is redirects and subdomains, which I need to visit manually with network switched off in order to add to the right container. This will help a lot for that issue!
    - lucideer 5y ago
      The main Firefox Containers extension has a nicer UI but quite a lot of missing features. Mainly the ability to edit the site list directly, and the fact that the way it registers a site against a container means it can't support adding a redirect to a container, nor (related) having separate Google services in separate containers (e.g. a Youtube container and separate Gmail container).
giancarlostoro 5y ago
The only thing I would love to see for containers is some sort of VPN that lets you connect through a different server on a specific container, and potentially isolated web history between containers. Then if I'm live streaming my browser to online strangers, one of the suggestions should be for anything personal (or if streaming to relatives / co-workers you don't expose your online life, which can be problematic to some), and also due to the container going through a VPN, or maybe even some sort of paid proxy service idk, my IP isn't potentially exposed to internet strangers. Given such an expansion to containers, I would double down and if you open any link from another app, Firefox would ask you which container to open the link through, this way you don't open it under the wrong container. I know, I know, probably a bit more than containers were intended for, but the containers thus far have been great otherwise. No need to open multiple browsers to test software quickly under multiple accounts, I can just login through all accounts I need to test on multiple containers. Edit: The more I think about it, the more I feel as though Mozilla could find plenty of VPN (their own underlying provider included) providers to fund support for these changes to make them generic across VPN services and transparent.
- okanesen 5y ago
  Probably not exactly what you want but for proxies you can use Container proxy[0] (not affiliated), which allows you to assign different proxies added by yourself to specific containers. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-proxy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
  - kbenson 5y ago
    I've used containers with container proxy for well over a year and it works great for segregating work traffic on my home system. I use a container for work traffic that is assigned to an SSH session to my work system that exposes a SOCKS proxy that I make sure is running. Eventually I moved work browsing to a different browser that I set to run through that proxy explicitly, but I still have the Firefox config set up in case I don't want to launch that, or don't care to copy and paste to the work browser some times (I wish I could find a way to make links launched from Outlook/Teams to open in Chrome but other links to open in Firefox).
thanksforfish 5y ago
One of the unexpected benefits for me has been that I can lock any OAuth enabled app to a container for the OAuth provider I use. To login, I check which container I'm in and click the associated button. Before this I'd always forget which OAuth provider I previously used. Did I Login with Google to DigitalOcean or did I use GitHub? Worse, I'd often click the wrong button and get logged into a new/empty account. I never came up with a good rule for which OAuth provider I should use, so it's a guessing game. Locking the app to the container means I don't really need to think.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
When will Firefox have a better UI for their profiles? That's literally the only thing stopping me from switching to Firefox. Google has an entire menu devoted to it.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Yeah I can't believe they still have the same solution as 2005
- sfink 5y ago
  about:profiles doesn't do what you need?
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    No the UI was really poor when I tried about:profiles.
- commoner 5y ago
  The free and open source Profile Switcher for Firefox extension, paired with the connector app, adds a browser profile menu to Firefox similar to the one on Chrome. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472
charles-m-knox 5y ago
Love seeing mentions of Firefox containers on HN. The native multi-account containers UI isn't able to do things such as container filtering, bulk rename/delete/recollection/etc, so a bit less than a year ago I wrote a lightweight extension to help manage containers here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-helper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-he...
- wussboy 5y ago
  Bookmarked. Will try immediately upon arrival at work.
- charles-m-knox 5y ago
  I'm not sure how to edit my original comment, but "recollection" should be "re-color". This was due to autocorrect.
gnufied 5y ago
Personally I love containers and I can't imagine using a browser without them. Though one issue which has been long standing for me is - tab search ('%') only works for current container. This is a big problem if you have 10-15 tabs open in different containers. Switching to tab you want is not easy. I wish mozilla prioritized and fixed - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
davidgerard 5y ago
Containers are a killer feature for Firefox, like having adblocking that works on mobile (unlike on Chrome). Just need containers on the mobile version.
- commoner 5y ago
  There's a petition on ideas@mozilla for implementing containers in the mobile version of Firefox, if you'd like to vote for it: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603 https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    Trouble is it apparently requires a lot of reimplementation deep in the guts of the mobile app; they do understand it's a highly-desired feature.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  >having adblocking that works on mobile I thought you couldn't install adblock addons (uBlock Matrix) on mobile Firefox?
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    uBlock Origin works great in Firefox on Android.
d4nyll 5y ago
I've been using Firefox Containers for over half a year now (I use it with the Temporary Containers[1] extension). For most parts, it's working great. However, whenever I encounter pop-up sign-in pages, such as for older websites and some Firefox extensions, the resulting user session cannot be accessed by the original page or extension. This is even if I open the pop-up with the same container, or with the 'No container' option. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
lf-non 5y ago
Firefox containers are cool. I do wish though that they were better integrated with the rest of the browser eg. bookmarks , history, downloads etc. I am aware that I can configure it to open certain sites in certain containers always, but that is not ideal in many cases eg. using github/gmail for both work & personal use. I currently use an extension [1] that enables support for opening links in specific containers using custom protocol handler. So now I can have a launch-gmail.sh script that invokes firefox 'ext+container:name=Google&url=https://mail.google.com https://mail.google.com' to open the site in a specific container. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c...
freediver 5y ago
Do any Safari users miss containers and why? It looks like tabs in private window (which are isolated in Safari) fulfill the role of temporary containers almost identically.
jhanschoo 5y ago
The last times I looked at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers addon, the story for managing persisted data and cookies per-container was abysmal. Is it now possible to seperately manage each account's persisted data?

226 points by cassepipe 5y ago

This seems to be down

Alternative low-effort solution that might break some websites (only issue I've run into so far is U2F based 2FA with Duo): privacy.firstparty.isolate -> true (in about:config) Effectively acts as a separate 'container' for every website.

syshum 5y ago
The problem here comes in when you have things like SSO where many sites auth to Google, or AzureAD, etc. With Continers I can login to the same site with mutiple accounts, for example one common use it where you have a Admin Account, and a Regular Account. You can use FireFox Containers to access the same site(s) using different accounts I also do this with Amazon, so I can have my Work Amazon, and my personal Amazon separated with out having to use the "Change Account" feature which I find to be annoying
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree there are definitely usecases containers address that FPI doesn't. However, if your use case is just "I don't want Facebook and friends to track me across websites", you should give FPI a try!

konradkpl 5y ago

Firefox Containers is a great feature that deserves more credits. This feature allows us to avoid tracking, while at the same time ensuring the convenience of use and does not require the user to change their habits. Do you want to limit facebook? Create the container, set the default facebook.com opening in it, and use the browser as before. This should be a standard feature in any browser.

freediver 5y ago
Not a container user so I hope you don't mind me asking, how is this different to opening facebook in new private tab/window? Is the convenience in the act of automatically opening it in container if you type in facebook.com or follow a link to it?
- scotu 5y ago
  what you mention is one advantage, another example is that you are not limited to 2 contexts (private tab & non-private tab vs as many containers as you need). Related to the advantage you mention is also the reverse: clicking a non-facebook link from the facebook container can (if you want) open a non-facebook container
  - freediver 5y ago
    Ok starting to understand it. Seems like something I would have a hard time explaining to a non-tech person.
    - scotu 5y ago
      yes, you could describe that use case as "quarantining" websites in short, but I'd say it's a power user feature if managed manually. If you install the "facebook container" extension, it's zero conf but it's only for facebook. Another use case I saw users being interested in, is you have 2 (or more) accounts on a website and you can login in both at the same time in 2 separate containers (you cannot quarantine the website to the container in this use case because you need to open it in multiple containers). You can do that with incognito, but the second one is very temporary as closing the browser is going to log you out.
      - freediver 5y ago
        So compared to a private tab, you basically get persistence and some form of organization (containers also act as groups). How important is to have tabs from different containers in the same window?

super_mario 5y ago

Are containers still necessary? Does the Firefox built in privacy (Strict privacy protection policy) provide same or similar functionality?

msdrigg 5y ago
I use containers to only use some google services while signed in. For instance I use gmail signed in but I google search in a separate container to not log that data in my account. I may be fooling myself and google can identify it anyway through my IP or something but it feels like I get a little extra anonymity.
- abacadaba 5y ago
  duckduckgo is a thing, just sayin
  - kashug 5y ago
    But the search is not as good. Or good might be subjective in this case. But I tried using DDG mutliple times, but every time I end up just doing the same search on google becouse it is much better at giving me the result I want. But this is just my personal experience.
  - msdrigg 5y ago
    I use ddg primarily, but I regularly need to use g! to reroute myself to Google when searching for anything that I don’t already have domain-specific knowledge for. Like if I want to just check syntax for a new programming language, ddg can handle the search just fine, but if I am doing initial research for a problem I don’t understand well, I need Google to get consistently relevant results.
d3nj4l 5y ago
Those are for different things. I use containers to log in to the same website with different accounts without having to switch browsers or open a new window. E.g., since Discord still doesn't support switching accounts in the year of our lord 2021, I have a container set up for the discord account I use for IRL stuff, and my personal account logged into the "vanilla" container. I can keep both discord tabs open side by side and get notifications from both. Even for websites that allow switching accounts, I prefer to use containers especially if the accounts go across different "domains" of my life. If I must log in to something personal at work or vice versa, I generally use a container for that to keep them separate.

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

One downside that I had hoped containers would fix was multiple accounts on AWS. Because of the way AWS handles the URL's for logging in I get: company1.signin.aws.amazon.com company2.signin.aws.amazon.com company3.signin.aws.amazon.com BUT FF only seems to remember the login/password for 1 of these at a time. I had hoped that putting them all in different containers would fix this but it appears that FF only matches based on the base domain name, and not the full sub-domain. If AWS had the domains structured as: AWS.com/company1 AWS.com/company2 AWS.com/company3 It might behave differently.

mech422 5y ago
I use different profiles for that... basically, I have multiple Firefox shortcuts, each using a different profile. You can also use containers with the profile to segregate things even more.
- anonymousab 5y ago
  I wish Firefox had better (chrome-level) support for containers. There's various small QoL things that add up to make them a much more usable feature. At the very least, exposing them via webextension APIs would let developers take care of it themselves.
  - commoner 5y ago
    While Firefox doesn't have WebExtension APIs for browser profiles, the Profile Switcher for Firefox extension uses a separately installed connector binary to add a profile switcher (similar to Chrome's) in Firefox. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472
Link512 5y ago
Have you considered using a password manager? With 1Password I'm able to save all logins for my AWS accounts and then just select the appropriate one when logging in.

detritus 5y ago

Containers are great! But since the recent v.91 update screwed the tabs up so much, there's no quick visual way to scan and see which container-type each tab is. Great stuff, well done Mozilla! What's the point in being able to customise a container's appearance, including colour, if they're not described on the tab itself?

syshum 5y ago
TreeStyleTabs... next to Containers, it is the only reason I still use FF, if FF drops support for either TreeStyleTabs or Containers there will be zero reason for me to continue using it.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Sideberry is TST with better perfomance, FYI. Also, right there with ya - treed tabs is the only reason I stick with FF.
  - BlackLotus89 5y ago
    Better performance not necessarily, but you can set custom rules for containers. You can set the user agent and proxy settings on a container base which is nice
    - generalizations 5y ago
      Firefox used to freeze up periodically when I used TST, and that went away when I switched. That's all I meant.
      - BlackLotus89 5y ago
        Yup went away from TST for the same reason. Made a performance comparison a few weeks ago to compare sidebery with TST (I got a few thousand open tabs, spread over ~50 windows) and didn't get the perfomance penalty I used to. Side note: some plugins "crashed" when testing TST, sidebery and tab stash at the same time. Sidebery seemed to be the most stable. (had at one time no adblock anymore so that's something) Side note 2: I really like some things about sidebery for instance the grouping of tabs and the possibility to see your bookmarks. TST needs to be extended through plugins for this, but some functionality is really only available in certain plugins. Side note 3: The tab handling of sidebery and TST feels quite different... If you are used to the normal tab handling you will be confused with sidebery... a lot (you can reconfigure it to be more vanilla, but I had multiple problems configuring the plugins). The tab switching isn't at all obvious at times. All in all I would recommend everyone to play around with containers and vertical tabs :) I know this little rant here went on a huge tangent from the article, but I wanted to clarify my experience with the named plugins.

amphitheatre 5y ago

One issue I have when using containers is that if I have a non-containerised tab and I click a link in it that leads to Twitter, which I have a container for, a new tab opens in the container, but the current tab also switches to a Twitter tab with the click, clobbering my session/history. Is this a bug or conflict with another setting or add-on?

tsjq 5y ago
this doesn't happen for me. what's the other add-ons you have ?
- amphitheatre 5y ago
  I have things like CanvasBlocker, uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, etc, and disabled third-party cookies. But nothing that should actively interfere with it. wrt containers, I have Multi-Account Containers, Containerise, and Temporary Containers. It happens every time I go to a URL that has an associated container I've made (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc). I might try resetting my container plugins to see if I can clear it.
- amphitheatre 5y ago
  Fixed it. Containerise has a separate "Keep old tabs" setting that is different to the Multi-Account Containers "Replace tab" functionality. It works as intended now. Horray!
  - tsjq 5y ago
    That's nice. thanks for sharing

mech422 5y ago

Don't forget, you can still use multiple profiles. I have multiple shortcuts setup, each starting FF with a different profile. Within a profile, I use containers to further partition things. edit: for instance, I have a 'banking' profile with containers for each bank, brokerage, etc. The profile is totally separate from my 'general browsing' profile, so nothing can be sniffed. And the containers allow me to partition off each service

extra88 5y ago
What benefit do you get from starting another Firefox instance with a different profile compared to simply using a different container in the same instance?
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  Different profiles can have different extensions, so if you don't fully trust some extension you can isolate it to a given profile.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Also different bookmarks and different histories.
- pavon 5y ago
  The ability to configure browser and extension settings differently for different profiles, plus different history/cookie for each. This is nice for experimenting with changes to umatrix settings without having results "pollute" my long-lived container storage. Also nice as a relief valve for when I don't won't to deal with my locked-down default settings, and just want to open up a site with everything enabled in a temporary container that gets blown away when I'm done.
scns 5y ago
Good idea, i opened a private window with all extensions disabled for banking and closed the normal window. Like your solution even more.

thrwawy283 5y ago

The real gem is this extension: Temporary Containers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... Basically every new tab is a new temporary container. Isolation all the time, by default. It's an added exercise for the reader, but you have to go into the settings of the extension and modify some of the mouse behavior. Basically if I want a link I click to share the same container as the parent, I Ctrl + Click. Left-clicking or middle-clicking is always a new temporary container. Containers are so much more than cookie isolation.

SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
I add Containerize to that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise It lets you define rules for URLs to allow any URL matching a pattern to always open in a certain container.
- c1yd3i 5y ago
  How is this different than managing the site list for a Firefox Container? Just that it's a CSV and patterns are supported? Do you just not define anything in the Firefox Container site list, and rely on this to manage it instead?
  - nsomaru 5y ago
    For me a source of some frustration is redirects and subdomains, which I need to visit manually with network switched off in order to add to the right container. This will help a lot for that issue!
  - lucideer 5y ago
    The main Firefox Containers extension has a nicer UI but quite a lot of missing features. Mainly the ability to edit the site list directly, and the fact that the way it registers a site against a container means it can't support adding a redirect to a container, nor (related) having separate Google services in separate containers (e.g. a Youtube container and separate Gmail container).

giancarlostoro 5y ago

The only thing I would love to see for containers is some sort of VPN that lets you connect through a different server on a specific container, and potentially isolated web history between containers. Then if I'm live streaming my browser to online strangers, one of the suggestions should be for anything personal (or if streaming to relatives / co-workers you don't expose your online life, which can be problematic to some), and also due to the container going through a VPN, or maybe even some sort of paid proxy service idk, my IP isn't potentially exposed to internet strangers. Given such an expansion to containers, I would double down and if you open any link from another app, Firefox would ask you which container to open the link through, this way you don't open it under the wrong container. I know, I know, probably a bit more than containers were intended for, but the containers thus far have been great otherwise. No need to open multiple browsers to test software quickly under multiple accounts, I can just login through all accounts I need to test on multiple containers. Edit: The more I think about it, the more I feel as though Mozilla could find plenty of VPN (their own underlying provider included) providers to fund support for these changes to make them generic across VPN services and transparent.

okanesen 5y ago
Probably not exactly what you want but for proxies you can use Container proxy[0] (not affiliated), which allows you to assign different proxies added by yourself to specific containers. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-proxy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
- kbenson 5y ago
  I've used containers with container proxy for well over a year and it works great for segregating work traffic on my home system. I use a container for work traffic that is assigned to an SSH session to my work system that exposes a SOCKS proxy that I make sure is running. Eventually I moved work browsing to a different browser that I set to run through that proxy explicitly, but I still have the Firefox config set up in case I don't want to launch that, or don't care to copy and paste to the work browser some times (I wish I could find a way to make links launched from Outlook/Teams to open in Chrome but other links to open in Firefox).

thanksforfish 5y ago

One of the unexpected benefits for me has been that I can lock any OAuth enabled app to a container for the OAuth provider I use. To login, I check which container I'm in and click the associated button. Before this I'd always forget which OAuth provider I previously used. Did I Login with Google to DigitalOcean or did I use GitHub? Worse, I'd often click the wrong button and get logged into a new/empty account. I never came up with a good rule for which OAuth provider I should use, so it's a guessing game. Locking the app to the container means I don't really need to think.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

When will Firefox have a better UI for their profiles? That's literally the only thing stopping me from switching to Firefox. Google has an entire menu devoted to it.

imbnwa 5y ago
Yeah I can't believe they still have the same solution as 2005
sfink 5y ago
about:profiles doesn't do what you need?
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  No the UI was really poor when I tried about:profiles.
commoner 5y ago
The free and open source Profile Switcher for Firefox extension, paired with the connector app, adds a browser profile menu to Firefox similar to the one on Chrome. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472

charles-m-knox 5y ago

Love seeing mentions of Firefox containers on HN. The native multi-account containers UI isn't able to do things such as container filtering, bulk rename/delete/recollection/etc, so a bit less than a year ago I wrote a lightweight extension to help manage containers here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-helper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-he...

wussboy 5y ago
Bookmarked. Will try immediately upon arrival at work.
charles-m-knox 5y ago
I'm not sure how to edit my original comment, but "recollection" should be "re-color". This was due to autocorrect.

gnufied 5y ago

Personally I love containers and I can't imagine using a browser without them. Though one issue which has been long standing for me is - tab search ('%') only works for current container. This is a big problem if you have 10-15 tabs open in different containers. Switching to tab you want is not easy. I wish mozilla prioritized and fixed - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858

davidgerard 5y ago

Containers are a killer feature for Firefox, like having adblocking that works on mobile (unlike on Chrome). Just need containers on the mobile version.

commoner 5y ago
There's a petition on ideas@mozilla for implementing containers in the mobile version of Firefox, if you'd like to vote for it: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603 https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603
- davidgerard 5y ago
  Trouble is it apparently requires a lot of reimplementation deep in the guts of the mobile app; they do understand it's a highly-desired feature.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>having adblocking that works on mobile I thought you couldn't install adblock addons (uBlock Matrix) on mobile Firefox?
- davidgerard 5y ago
  uBlock Origin works great in Firefox on Android.

d4nyll 5y ago

I've been using Firefox Containers for over half a year now (I use it with the Temporary Containers[1] extension). For most parts, it's working great. However, whenever I encounter pop-up sign-in pages, such as for older websites and some Firefox extensions, the resulting user session cannot be accessed by the original page or extension. This is even if I open the pop-up with the same container, or with the 'No container' option. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

lf-non 5y ago

Firefox containers are cool. I do wish though that they were better integrated with the rest of the browser eg. bookmarks , history, downloads etc. I am aware that I can configure it to open certain sites in certain containers always, but that is not ideal in many cases eg. using github/gmail for both work & personal use. I currently use an extension [1] that enables support for opening links in specific containers using custom protocol handler. So now I can have a launch-gmail.sh script that invokes firefox 'ext+container:name=Google&url=https://mail.google.com https://mail.google.com' to open the site in a specific container. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c...

freediver 5y ago

Do any Safari users miss containers and why? It looks like tabs in private window (which are isolated in Safari) fulfill the role of temporary containers almost identically.

jhanschoo 5y ago

The last times I looked at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers addon, the story for managing persisted data and cookies per-container was abysmal. Is it now possible to seperately manage each account's persisted data?