I wish Firefox exposed a better UI for it's profiles. It seems like a really powerful feature that is much less useful than it might be due to poor ergonomics...
I understand though why Mozilla seems to be having such a hard time converging on a UX for Container Tabs that makes everyone happy and it may be impossible to ever surface 100% of the power of profiles to the average user. But -ProfileManager is so long in the tooth and so clearly predates modern niceties that it would be great for better UI/UX out of the box today.
Combine that experience with the current Containers sandboxing feature and that would be a dream.
There are extension providing pretty much the same experience, like Panorama view [1]. I agree that it's very convenient to separate tabs into separate topics, and only view the ones that are relevant at any time.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
Besides the classic work/home/sysadmin profiles, I also have a profile for browsing websites like /r/MensRights or christian websites: People have been fired for way less, so with such an incentive, Firefox tabs are way below expectations in terms of design.
Most browsers already have highly separated threads/processes for different tabs for performance reasons alone, but also cross-tab security issues. In most cases the technical difference between two tabs in the same window and two tabs in different windows is minimal. Technical differences in profiles such as different data folder on the hard drive is even already a part of Firefox's container tabs.
There is definitely an experiential difference, but a lot of the same signifiers (different themes / different "title" bars / etc) can be brought in and applied to multiple tabs in the same window, switching with tabs themselves. Or perhaps new UX signifiers might be developed that work better in a mixed tab space. It was encouraging that Mozilla was experimenting in that space, at least, even if what they built they weren't entirely happy with user studies of it. Again, the fundamental issue should be solvable with enough applied UX. We likely haven't discovered the solution for that yet (especially not one usable by novice users), but its still something interesting to continue to research and something that I hope is continued to be researched.
(PS If you are worried about getting fired over your dirty laundry, I'm not sure airing it in cleartext on HN is exactly the right idea either.)
After that when you click a link to that site from a different container, it will prompt you and ask if you want to use the other container or continue with the one you were just using. It will remember your choice.
One moment of inattention, and you're surfing the whole web for hours in your Facebook container.
https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/8...
Which users are you referring to, the ones who read HN and use firefox with containers? Most non-technical people would think you told them a conspiracy theory if you said Facebook can track their browsing outside the site, let alone be aware of that possibility enough to install firefox then install and configure containers. People who know about these risks and are installing extensions like containers are already conscious of their exposure on the web and are doing their due diligence not to leave much-identifying information out there, to begin with.
The sad truth is we write, and comment, and endlessly debate security best practices here that only get used by people reading this forum or small, highly technical and specific corners of Reddit.
In migrating the primary container tab UI into an extension, Mozilla seems committed to at least providing the functionality as a long term extension API. So I don't expect the feature to be scrapped at this point; maybe just to remain rather anemic "out of the box" for the time being as Mozilla iterates on its extension. That has me curious if there's a good power user-focused extension already to meet my profile needs (or how hard it would be to build one), but so far that's only been an idle curiosity.
Profilemaker pairs perfectly with this.
Container tabs also were terrible if you needed a persistent login. My school proxy for journal subscriptions has like half a dozen redirects with different URL names, I either had to not use containers here or add an exception for every step in the login process that it would break because of the container system. I hated constantly running into problems with containers breaking websites and making browsing so cumbersome that I stopped using them entirely.
Like some of the esoteric Adblocker configurations favored here, they are good in principle, but in practice break 50% of websites on the internet without spending serious time crafting exceptions for every issue you run into on every new site you find.
Profiles should be easy to use, like any other application: When you logout of one profile and into another, everything changes.