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Comment by vsviridov | Hacker News Reader

Containers are great. I've been using them for a bit. They definitely need a few things. Like an ability for the "new tab" to be sticky (if I'm in a container - new tab should open in the same container), and the ability to pick which container to open things in when the OS triggers the browser to open a URL. Right now it's very leaky... Say I start a registration process for a site in a container, they send a email confirmation, I click the link and it opens outside of the container, leaking the cookies. Bad for OPSEC.

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We have an issue in the GitHub repo for this ... the more upvotes it gets, the more likely we will put it into a next release. :)

https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot-containers/issues/306

Agreed. Right now we're pretty hands off about modifying default behaviors, link handling etc. Chalk this up to us wanting to be unopinionated about specific use cases, but there are definitely some optimizations to be made to shore up the situations you describe. Test Pilot is for WIP software, so don't be shy about filing issues.

Would it be possible to have an add-on for this? One that automatically opens each website in a new container? That would allow default behaviour for most people, but for those that want isolation, it would be easy to get it.

There is a Contextual Identities API for WebExtensions shipping in Firefox 53:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...

It would be great if it could create automatically one container per domain: every site would be neatly separated from all the other ones. If you logged in Facebook the other tabs for other sites wouldn't know about it. Doing that manually every time is almost impossible.

I would pay actual money to help get a feature like that into Chromium or Firefox. Hell, if Firefox added that exact feature I might actually rethink my decision to switch to Chrome once they drop support for all the addons I use.

There is an experimental implementation of that feature, called "First Party Isolation", in Firefox today. You just need to set the `privacy.firstparty.isolate` pref = true in about:config.

With this pref enabled, advertiser X will serve you different cookies on site A and B. They won't be able to track your browsing history from site to site. However, this breaks a lot of sites that depend on third-party services for login authentication or comment systems.

Here is the Firefox bug where you can report broken sites:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299996

We are also hard at work supporting add-on authors porting to WebExtension APIs. I'm especially trying to help Privacy & Security add-on authors.

uBlock, NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies. Also DisableWebRTC. Firefox would be Opera, Chrome or Vivaldi without them. No particular reason to use it or a random one among the others. Stylish and Greasemonkey are useful too, when sites insist doing the wrong things. I hope all of them survive the switch. Will they?

You can keep track at https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/#addons

uBlock Origin started as a Chrome extension.

This would actually be implementable with the new WebExtensions for containers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...

Essentially building a new container per origin.

There is a feature called First Party Isolation that (I think) does what you want for normal tabs, and can already be enabled through about:config. (initially developed for the Tor Browser Bundle, their description of it is here https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#ident... )

Thanks for that. Found it and enabled it.

privacy.firstparty.isolate

Beware that privacy.firstparty.isolate might break some sites that depend on third-party services for login authentication or comment systems. If you find any broken sites, you can report them in Bugzilla and mention this Firefox bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299996

I use noscript to by default turn off scripts from 3rd party sites (unless whitelisted). It breaks quite a few sites, but it also makes lots of sites load quicker and doesn't load a bunch of advertising/tracking stuff that I don't really want loaded anyway.

They're great, but they seem to force me to change my workflow to work around them.

If a FF PM is reading this: being able to register a domain for a container type would be a killer feature.

Not the PM you're looking for, but: that feedback has definitely already been recorded.

1. Hello potch! 2. Yes, this is among the most requested features we've seen so far. Containers in Test Pilot will remain in active development for the foreseeable future, so I wouldn't be surprised to see such a feature forthcoming.

The following GitHub issue tracks that feature request. It might be cool to ship a default classification list for common banking and shopping sites so they are already "contained".

https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot-containers/issues/306

My only problem is that at my monitor resolution the little color strip is almost invisible. I'd like for it to be more visually clear.

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