Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Anyone thinking of installing Firefox should check out the Multi-Account Containers addon. I'm pretty sure such functionality doesn't exist for Chrome, and it makes it possible to isolate different sites and logins from each other. It's one of the best reasons to switch to Firefox, in my opinion.

View on HN

I love it. Wish container settings would be synced though: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3... #1 most requested feature so there's hope, although it's been open for over two years. Maybe now that the new bookmark sync mechanism is rolled out in Firefox 70, the sync team may have capacity for a new task.

I agree. Ran into that wish again this morning setting up a new computer installation. Only thing that I have to carry over manually.

Very annoying, especially if you are testing stuff or debugging in firefox and frequently change profiles. Also disabling seems to reset all settings for the container add-on which is not great to put it mildly.

I don't get why this lives in an extension. It's even advertised in the options, but requires downloading a separate component. Creating an awkward experience as what looks like a core feature lives in an external module. I imagine there is a non-zero number of users who look at containers then opt not to use it because of the download requirement.

I do get it. I've been using it for several months, and I run into problems fairly often. Nothing wrong with the implementation, AFAICT, but it takes a fair amount of thought to assign sites to different containers, and you can easily end up following links that cross container boundaries and then don't work right because of the context change. I've even run into several corporate sites where federated authentication simply won't work in a container, at all.

"I do get it. I've been using it for several months, and I run into problems fairly often. Nothing wrong with the implementation, AFAICT, but it takes a fair amount of thought to assign sites to different containers, and you can easily end up following links that cross container boundaries and then don't work right because of the context change."

See my comment above - I think the obvious workflow for containers is a container window, not a tab, and all tabs created in that window inherit the container settings.

As I also note, above, I don't see how to manage per-container cookies and history ... I can't clear history for just my "banking" container (or whatever).

I really want to make heavy use of a container-like feature but keep stumbling over things like this.

That makes a lot of sense, same as private browsing which opens a new window.

"Anyone thinking of installing Firefox should check out the Multi-Account Containers addon. I'm pretty sure such functionality doesn't exist for Chrome, and it makes it possible to isolate different sites and logins from each other."

Remind me - is this different than the "Container Tab" choice in the File menu ?

I find the built-in container functionality in Firefox to be surprisingly awkward and poorly thought out ...

For instance, the very first use-case that I attempted (create a Window, not a tab and have all new tabs inherit that same container) is impossible.

It also appears to be impossible to clear the history of just a container.

These are basic use-cases that came up, immediately, in a cursory exploration of the feature - I wasn't digging deep to find these ...

Try it and see, I’m very happy with it. You can even specify that any time you go to a particular domain, you use a specific container. Great for separating work from personal for a work machine.

I thought the same for the first month or two, but as I started examining what it was doing and why, a lot of their choices made more sense.

Their contrainers are domain centric, not WI dow or tab centric. You can tell a domain to always be in a container, and then on the prompt to change contrainers when you visit th at domain, you can confirm to always switch.

Locking a window to a container would result in people following links and logging in again in accident in a different container, or being constantly annoyed that it wasn't the right one. If they closed the normal WI dow and kept that one, it would be annoying until they figured it out, and they would probably blame Mozilla thinking it a bug.

It's not a bad idea, but I can defi itely see why they would leave it out of the regular setup, as it's prone to causing confusion and only really useful for power users. It's ripe to be implemented as an additional addon though.

That's basically the process I went through with 3-4 other complaints I had. On actually thinking through it, they had one of the best sane approaches. Maybe when more people are familiar with the concept and how it acts and looks they can extend it, but there's only so much complexity you can push to the general public at one time.

Chrome has something similar built in called profiles, each profile is a unique session (like incognito except it persists)

Unless something has changed, the Chrome functionality associates an entire window with a particular profile. Firefox lets you have tabs in different containers, colour coded and all in the same window. I find this much nicer to use.

If chrome profiles are anything like Firefox profiles then they are a lot more heavyweight than container tabs

Thank you for posting this, never realized such a thing existed. Makes it easy to maintain different identities. It's made by Mozilla too. Wonder why it isn't a core feature of Firefox.

It probably will be. Mozilla frequently moves extensions from Labs (which existed then got cancelled, and now has been reinstated iirc) to core Firefox.

They try to develop most new features as extensions first these days. It keeps the release cycles from impacting each other and lets them make sure that the extension APIs remain useful for other developers. If it turns out to be a good feature they'll either bundle the extension or build it into the browser from the extension. That's not always something people celebrate though, see the pocket stuff.

It has been a core feature since v50, albeit with less feature than the addon. It's still disabled by default, just need to toggle the following configs to enable it:

  privacy.userContext.enabled;true
  privacy.userContext.ui.enabled;true
  privacy.userContext.longPressBehavior;2

The last config is so that you can open a new container tab by long-pressing the new tab button.

+1 for this. Takes a bit of configuring before you have it all working seemlessly, and it's probably not ready for non-tinkerers - yet - but it's really powerful.

profiles is close. better in some ways (absolutely arbitrarily grouping), worse in others (not automatic, so user-error prone)

Does this work on mobile?

is this just for windows/linux (desktop) installs of firefox? or is android included in this feature?

Containers were not supported on Android last time I checked, a few month ago. No containers on iOS also.

One more problem is that containers are an addon and do not sync between Firefoxes on different desktops. Still extremely useful though.

No support for Android (yet). Install this Facebook container [1] on the desktop.

A request: I run Firefox nightly [2] as my main browser and would like to request everyone to consider using a pre-release version of Firefox if possible. It helps us make the argument that Mozilla should not run experiments in Firefox stable.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/

Been running nightly builds since I think 0.4 - makes web development ‘fun’ as you can never be sure if something works or not in a browser nightly build! Fortunately I don’t have to do that much any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com