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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

I think, and always thought of it as intuitive with the way I use browsers, that sessions should work as a tree. So only child tabs in that tree should see the contents of parent's session. If I open a new tab, it's a new tree. Bookmarks could create permanent root node.

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I wrote something that launches a new instance of the Firefox engine for specific profiles.

https://github.com/unqueued/foxbox

But I never got around to polishing it and making it more accessible.

The thing that really prompted me was peeking at what financial websites were doing, trying to connect to data mining sites like ru4.com and refusing to load if they couldn't connect to facebook.com and twitter.com.

My script also fixes paths in profile folders so that the roboforms extension will still work, because it is the only password manager that I have found that is able to completely automate my logins, despite the best efforts of UX designers.

I also couldn't order food from seamless.com unless I allowed a script on their site to connect to facebook.com. So, now seamless.com gets its own empty sandbox.

And because you're using your filesystem to store a browser profile, you can have specific extensions or settings for each profile.

So whenever I want to do financial stuff, it just connects over an autossh tunnel to my home, so it will never trigger any any stupid re-authentications when I'm connecting from a cellphone or work.

The Tree Style Tabs add-on supports this behavior with Firefox's containers, it is awesome.

Damn I'm gonna have to give that a go.

That's awesome, thanks. I've tried the Tree Style Tabs in the past, it made a lot of sense to me, but unfortunately I had other issues with FF back then. Now with the containers support there's more incentive to try it again.

I found "Tree Style Tab", which doesn't mention anything about containers.

You have a link and/or author for the add-on to which you're referring?

The problem with this (and the reason browsers don't already do things this way) is that it breaks Single Sign-On flows like OAuth.

When your browser redirects a tab from example.com to accounts.google.com to do an OAuth login, the Google OAuth login cookie that gets set by accounts.google.com under that tab, needs to also be visible later on to any other tab whose "root node" navigates to accounts.google.com.

Maybe you can make an exception for just SSO providers—but won't other nefarious uses (e.g. analytics providers) then just pretend to be SSO flows?

And maybe you can just whitelist the existing SSO providers—but that's an instant oligopoly.

Let’s break it and have the browser handle auth flow itself.

But then you have state shared between tabs and that breaks OPs whole idea, because it kills the sandboxing.

See BrowserID. It’s based on cryptographic proof and would work with any backend, including offline.

That's not a bug, that's the point.

"Single sign on" means "contact centralised provider with identifying information plus site browsed".

The explicit desire here is to stop that tracking.

Tracking _is_ single sign on with the "sign on" being invisible to the user.

You're thinking of consumer SSO. There's also enterprise SSO. Per-tab cookie isolation would break pretty much every bigcorp's Intranet, because they're composed of a bunch of different services that all rely on a centralized IAM provider.

(Mind you, Google themselves are working to move enterprises away from this model, with their https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp/ effort avoiding the "Intranet as a bunch of services on separate internal domains" model, in favor of a "Intranet as a bunch of services all living under smart proxies that make them look like one domain and handle IAM for you" model. But enterprises would need to move first, before complete tab isolation could be workable for them.)

There's also even-more-enterprise SSO, i.e. SAML and its "using your bank as an SSO provider to prove your identity to government services" use-cases. This actually isn't SSO at all—there are more identity providers than there are services. The point here is to federate proofs-of-identity by allowing many different (whitelisted) agencies to vouch for your identity, so that the government doesn't need to issue you some centralized proof-of-identity. This would also break under complete tab isolation, and I don't think there's any good replacement in this case.

Not at all, it's the exact same thing in that case as well, it's just that you _want_ the tracking.

If you don't want every tab to be connected, every tab isn't connected.

How do you suggest enabling these use-cases for users that want them, on top of a browser that isolates tabs by default, without requiring any technical aptitude of the user to understand what a "cookie" is (which would normally suggest "have a UX flow for it") but while preventing arbitrary websites from triggering such a flow and thereby tricking these non-technical users into enabling the site to track them?

It's not like the problem is impossible; nobody is saying that. My point is that the solution is non-obvious to the point that nobody has solved it yet, despite likely man-years being put into trying. Firefox Containers are the best UX we've come up with so far to kinda-sorta solve the problem. Do you have any better idea?

Easy: take the original comment literally and make the interface like Tree Style Tabs [0].

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

this is an ideal example of "you know you need this, whitelist it" vs "this is always allowed". sites will definitely start messaging "whitelist or follow link from X" if default-block becomes popular, so I don't really think it'll break anything, tho it might be a bit more annoying.

(personally I get a small hit of joy every time I hit a site that is caught and blocked trying to do things it shouldn't, and vow never to return. it's better than it happening without knowing.)

What about have the consumers sign on to the SSO provider at the root node?

I had the same issue with the Facebook container tab on Firefox as well.

A new tab should be able to go "back" to its parent. Kind of weird that no browser has implemented this yet.

There is (was?) a prototype built on top of Servo and browser.html for this: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lossless-web-navigation-with...

Not sure if it has any traction anymore.

If I understand you correctly, Safari does this on both iOS and macOS.

If you click a link that opens a new tab and swipe back from that new tab, Safari closes the new tab and shows you the previous tab.

I’m not exactly sure of the behavior when you open a new tab, then go to another tab, then back to the tab that was opened and then swipe back, though.

Safari for iOS has kind of a "grace period" where the back gestures do work from the new tab. But I think this is more to aid the confusion for people who don't understand that a new tab has even been created.

If you switch tabs, or close the app, or do anything other than somewhat immediately go back, that back history is lost. And if you do use the shortcut to go back, the new tab is destroyed. There's no ability to open a bunch of tabs and then in each of them independently navigate back to the parent.

Wouldn't you then have to log in twice to the same site if you have it opened in multiple tabs?

Sounds like a feature to me. I'd love it if things worked that way.

People who are aware of how pervasive tracking is wouldn't mind much indeed. The average user would be _infuriated_ of having to login every time they open a tab.

Average users know how to use multiple tabs?

That's where LastPass, et. al. come to the rescue. Minimizes the annoyance of multiple logins, while increasing overall security if they didn't already use a password manager.

Minimizes, but does not remove.

I'll stick to Chrome when I want my browser to not lose my sessions constantly.

Even if credentials were stored in browser (ideally has a revocable token, not a password) and login was one-click?

There's only so long that all those angry, multi-tabbing, somehow-simultaneously-both-ignorant-and-power users will be infuriated at every single website before they forget it ever wasn't like that.

Possibly add a merge trees feature?

You can choose to “always open this site in this container” and have the cookie persist.

you can "reopen this tab in container: ..." by right clicking on a tab, so yes, but going "oh I needed google creds" is two clicks.

A long time ago, there used to be a browser called "Athena", which did exactly this.

From a UX perspective, that sounds confusing to me. How do you know which subtree from 2 weeks ago each tab is from? It might be an alright tradeoff for 'power' users though

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