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Comment by Thorncorona | Hacker News Reader

FF just came out with multi account containers about a month ago ->

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Firefox containers are awesome. Once you've got a GMail account it's really easy to fall into the trap of letting Google track your everything. GMail, Google searches, Google Maps, You Tube.

Containers splits them out beautifully, with minimal tracking.

With Chrome / Chromium, Google wants you to log-in using a Google account, so you fall into the trap again.

Does Google actually track web activity when logged out whilst logged in to Chrome? By this I mean connecting e.g. searches done on google maps with your account, not just storing the history.

Google of course has all the information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that (you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect Google to use browser fingerprinting to track you when logged out in a different browser, but I'm not sure about web activity in Chrome. Sounds plausible either way.

The use case for this is that you want to leave your gmail/youtube/etc all logged in, but not let Google track you all over the internet. My primary use for this feature is this specific use case. I created a "Google Spyware" container and configured Google-related things to open in there. If I go to google.com outside of that container, I'm a non-logged-in user. If I open it in the container I AM logged in, so I get all the convenience of staying logged in without the downside of all the surveillance. Of course there are other means to track me, but this is a big step in the right direction.

I know. I've been using containers ever since it was an experiment :)

My question is independent of container tabs, it's a question of whether we know the level of tracking Google does on a signed-in chrome where your google account is not signed in in the session (is this even possible?)

You can find pretty much all the data that Google has on you - they allow you to examine the history of it. As far as I know they don't track your entire web browsing history but they do record all uses of their sites with your account.

But personally I certainly don't need to be logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than having to go about deleting it (or not because there's so many other things to get distracted by)

> don't track your entire web browsing history

Entire or not, does Google analytics apply here?

Yeah, I think this is where things start to get fairly pointless with avoiding being tracked. I'm imagining that even at a basic level they can match up any Google searches / GMail you use to your IP address and then follow that via Google Analytics.

I'm happily using DDG as a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need to stop using GMail.

ProtonMail or Tutanota are great replacements.

I've been a happy customer of https://www.fastmail.com/ for some years now (and used Gmail before). I highly recommend them for anyone considering leaving Gmail. You pay them with money instead of data.

Why wouldn't they? Judging from the RLZ related files I had to clean off of my Mac, Google is bundling RLZ (Google's tracking library) with Chrome on all OSes. I'd be shocked if they're deploying but not using something like that.

And prior to that you could run multiple Firefox instances with different profiles. Not super hard.

> you could run multiple Firefox instances with different profiles

But not at the same time, which is a showstopper to me (still using Firefox Nightly as main browser).

You can absolutely run multiple different instances at the same time.

I've been using Firefox this way for over a year, 2 instances open right now.

It is possible, but it's messy in terms of which one is the default (clicking on links outside of the browser), taskbar/launcher buttons (OS- and DE-dependent, some configurations have issues e.g. with pinning) etc. I think there was something else - minor and just slightly inconvenient - but I forgot.

Compared to ProfileManager, Container Tabs are absolutely awesome. Completely different experience, smooth and nice.

ProfileManager is a bit awkward indeed. You can pass `-p primaryprofile` and `-p secondaryprofile -no-remote` to make sure that links from OS are not opened in the 2nd instance, but then, when you close Firefox and click an external link, it will open Firefox with the last opened profile, which might be `secondaryprofile`.

The solution for me was to use one Firefox installation per profile: primary = stable, secondary = nightly.

Container tabs are way nicer than this, but since I open lots of tabs, I still like the distinction between stable and nightly (stable = regular browsing, nightly = FB).

Thanks to you I found something really useful. With this I can finally have the convenient replacement for the good old private window which gets overused for logging in to multiple accounts simultaneously.

Do they sync?

What do you mean by that?

If your use case is not covered, you surely can write a WebExtension to provide the functionality. Containers as well as sync are exposed in the API.

I just wanted to know if the containers will be automatically synced across devices.

I can't even get them to persist after restarting FF. :/

Please describe the behaviour you're seeing vs. expecting. Is the session not restoring the URLs in the right container? That sounds like a bug to me. The container names (if you change from default) should be stored in the settings – if not, something is wrong on your machine. If you want to always open some specific URLs on start, pin those tabs.

I updated the container names, colors, and icons. Opened a few tabs here and there. Installed a user agent switching plugin. Restarted to enable said plugin. While the session was restored, including the containers, the non-default container names/meta info were not. Tabs in non-default containers showed up with no labels, and there was no apparent way to open up a new tab in one of the custom containers.

Also, changing a container's color does not change the color shown on existing tabs.

Please check and file these bugs here: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers – I assume you are using this extension?

It's not clear to me what exactly you expect to Sync.

Container settings (names, colors, icons, assignments) should be synced (if not, please file a bug). Open tabs will be synced, not sure how they will open on another machine (considering URL-to-Container assignments should be synced, they should open in the respective containers – maybe there's a possible improvement here).

I expect the different Cookie stores to be synced as well, if not, that's a bug.

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