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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

On top of uBlock Origin / uMatrix, some of the other Firefox's trump cards to me are:

* Tree Style Tab: makes tabs much more manageable, no parallel in Chrome. If you open dozens of tabs, after using this, you can only pity the traditional tab management [1].

* Containers and container tabs: it's a bit like having separate Chrome profiles for separate contexts, but you can also have them as tabs in the same window.

* Sync / sign-in server that is open source and that you can run on your own if you choose.

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

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Container tabs have made my life much easier, as I'm managing a number of Amazon accounts, and being able to do that side-by-side is a life-saver.

You can do the same thing with Profiles in Chromium-based browsers, without having to add an extension.

firefox has profiles too. Profiles aren't the same as containers tabs though. They are also built in, not addons.

Correct. Firefox's profiles are not the same as Chromium.

What benefit do the Firefox containers have that Chromium profiles are missing?

Mostly, you can't have different profiles in the tabs of the same window in Chrome, and you can have different containers in the tabs of the same window in Firefox.

E.g. you can run your email tab in the default container, and a bank app in a separate "money" container next to it.

Or you can run one gmail (or outlook, etc) account in one tab, and an another gmail (or outlook, etc) account in another tab next to it.

Also if you only want to separate (log-in) cookies, local storage and that kind of things for certain sites, but don't want separate history, bookmarks, settings, add-ons, etc., which is what you'd also get if using completely separate profiles.

First, I'd like to point out, that Containers are built-in with Firefox, even though you generally want at least the official add-on for ease of use.

Containers were actually the reason for me to switch over from Chrome about a year ago. The biggest benefit I see is that they're made easy to extend via add-ons.

In my set up I currently have a new container created every time I open a new tab, either blank or from a link, and automatically removed after I close them, which is made possible by Temporary Containers add-on in auto mode.

This creates automatic boundaries for all of my browsing. I then also have persistent containers for sites I want to be logged in to.

If a person wants to test a website using several accounts in Chrome, they need to open and manage several windows. Lame.

If a person wants to access an ad-ridden website using several accounts in Chrome, they need to install, configure and maintain all of their favorite ad-blockers and anti-tracking extensions in several Chrome profiles. Lame.

In my experience, people who prefer profiles over containers are mostly casual users who don't configure profiles and use maybe one or two extensions.

I really enjoy the Containers. The only problem is that you can only have a single container tied to an individual site. I'd rather like it to be tied to a subpath or url "root" so I could use it with GitHub.

Only for the automatic association you mean? You can manually open a tab into any container.

I recommend the Search and Switch container[1] extension for that. You open a new tab, type 'co <container name' and it reloads that tab into the given container. For example, I have a container for all things Google, called "Google", and the extension use would go like this 'co google', or even 'co goo'. It's smart enough to figure it out.

Plus, you can also move existing tabs into a given container the same way, not just new tabs, all at the cost of a single tab refresh.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-and-sw...

I just discovered "Reader-View" in Firefox! Chrome doesn't have anything like that built-in and I've always had to rely on an extension to make CSS heavy pages readable. No more!

Reader view -> Save as PDF, and you have a nice readable copy of a non-interactive website to read when connectivity is sparse.

very handy to quickly get rid of visual clutter like overlays for cookie consent checkboxes, subscribe notifications or disable-your-adblocker overlays/popups.

Just hit reader mode and its all gone.

I always loved using the ' key to open a find box that only searched links. great for mouseless browsing. (Although I switched off from firefox a long time ago due to their political ideology.)

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