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Comment by dguo | Hacker News Reader

The post briefly mentions multi-account containers[1]. I have loved using them and regard them as a killer feature for Firefox. Very few websites support account switching. Google is probably the best example, and even then, I don't really want to log in to both my personal and work Gmail within the same session. But containers effectively and cleanly enable multiple sessions for all websites.

Like tabs so many years ago, it's the kind of feature that seems obvious in retrospect. I can't think of a hard technical reason why we couldn't have had container tabs a long time ago. I hope mobile and desktop OSes will one day implement the same feature for apps/programs.

Whoever was involved in coming up with the idea and with implementing it, thank you!

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

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I love containers, and use them heavily, but am disappointed they don't sync to all your computers like bookmarks and extensions. Every new machine, I get to start over on the 'always open this site in work container'

This. Please add this Firefox. For people who are anal that moving from machine to machine is the same container naming and ordering (for shortcuts to launch specific containers) is time consuming to redo by hand.

Beyond that - for container users I recently started using "Temporary Containers" [0] and it's an awesome use case for disposable containers where no browser interaction is associated. It's a fantastic use of containers.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I use Temporary Containers everywhere, and I think it's a great step forward in terms of privacy and security. I wish one day we could have a different IP and browser fingerprint per temporary container.

yeah, that's the reason I stopped using them and switched to multiple profiles with syncing to different accounts.

I do the same, it works quite well. I still use multicontainer inside those though, 1 for social media and for everything else.

Do containers transfer if you sync the Firefox profile with rsync or something? I haven't tried yet but if I get a second machine I'd like to be able to do this.

Containers still have quite a bad UX though. It’s OK to open a tab in the desired container and load Facebook, but whenever you leave Facebook via a link, it will stay in the same container. If you eventually end up on a website you want to be logged in to, you’ll have to manually switch to the right container again.

It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.

Is that not the point though? You don't want to expose to Facebook that you have a account on some 3rd party site and expose to some 3red party site you have a Facebook accoun.

You describe exactly what I would want and expect.

Do you mean that it would be exposed by the referrer? I guess so. It’s not clear whether the referrer is preserved anyway when you refresh the external page in a different container. In theory could the external page have a Facebook widget that would be able to see your Facebook account anyway? I’m not really sure, I don’t know enough about how cookies work across domains.

I feel like this is the point. It’s not really clear how to best use containers to protect your privacy; it feels like you have to understand a lot about how the web works and how Firefox works.

Beyond referrer, there are utm tags, unique URLs, fingerprinting, etc.

> It’s not really clear how to best use containers to protect your privacy

Do you think private browsing sessions are also unclear/have unintuitive UX? It seems like firefox containers are just private browsing sessions that you can close and re-open.

Private browsing is relatively simple - nothing is preserved. It’s similar but definitely easier to understand than containers, where you have _n_ containers, each with some subset of cookies representing your identities on various sites. Not only do you have to mentally keep track of what cookies are in each container and make sure to always open certain links in the right container, you also have to worry about unique URL signatures permanently leaking your identity between containers if you’re not careful, as mentioned in a sibling comment.

Yet these days facebook will be using IP tracking anyway, it won’t matter whether you’re logged in or not, in the other containers, if you’re just logged in once, they will know what sites you’re visiting, your browser fingerprint easily identify as you, even if you’re not logged into Facebook in those containers.

My understanding is the Facebook container add-on blocks phoning home by Facebook like and share buttons. You are right that ad networks can still share data (use uBlock Origin) or websites can share this in the back end (nothing we can do about I guess) but the Facebook container is not nothing.

The Facebook Container add-on is distinct from the Multi-Account Containers feature.

It's much friendlier than building your own containers, since most of the hard work and decisions have been made by the developers of the Facebook Container add-on.

You should definitely install the Facebook Container if you have a Facebook account, it traps that neatly inside a box. These days it can even be taught about any sites you use Facebook to authenticate with (this isn't a good idea but whatever) to bring them inside the container while everything else stays outside.

Yeah but you still really should be using utilities like cookie autodelete, clearURLs, pihole, decentraleyes, and nano defender.

Ip tracking is worthless. Most people have half a dozen devices. I was actually shocked recently that I have 22 devices on my network. Then think about a relatively small business. There could be hundreds of devices. All from the same ip

You can combine IP address with fingerprint built from WebGL video card information, fonts list and rendering details, OS name, CPU type, memory size (yes, browser provides this) and screen resolution.

I'm a bit confused, is the nature of the complaint that Firefox lets you use multi-account containers without at the same time forcing you to use resist-fingerprinting? Because you can certainly choose to use both.

If your point is that resist-fingerprinting would be a sane default, I agree. But Mozilla insists that most firefox users would be too confused by a few websites breaking because of it.

A small network will likely have identical setups. Plus I pointed out directly the one case of ip tracking being useless. Clearly there are other way to track an individual computers. But your counter argument is irrelevant regarding in my limited scope reply

Right-click and "open in new container tab" gives you a choice of containers to open the link in, fwiw.

Might want to be careful with something like this, since facebook/google/etc decorate links with outward redirects for tracking purposes.

On the other side of this tracking, there are also URL parameters like fbclid, gclid, etc., that can tell the opened site where you came from and which post/content piece on that platform you came from. Additional extensions to remove these parameters are also necessary.

You can set it that certain sites always launch in certain containers, if that would help

You can do this! Although admittedly the setup is kind of annoying / unintuitive. What you're looking for is the temporary containers extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/temporary-container...

you make it so it always opens a specific page in a specific container, its like giving them types

I wish it was a bit more reliable - browser crashes and/or updates have lost all my containers several times.

Nevertheless once you've got used to it, it becomes an essential feature. Another reason to be thankful for Firefox's existence.

But getting separate session between different private browsing windows has been requested for a very long time with no dice [1].

[1]:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117222

I love containers as well. Does anyone know when/if they'll be coming to Firefox for Android and iOS?

Also, I really wish you would be able to specify which container you want in the Home button when using multiple urls for your default tabs.

So this:

    https://gmail.com/|https://gmail.com/

Would become something like this:

    {container:personal}https://gmail.com/|{container:work}https://gmail.com/

I'm pretty sure Mozilla has abandoned Firefox on Android to work on Firefox Preview (code named Fenix).

Here is the github issue that tracks container support on Firefox Preview: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1481

I would LOVE to use Firefox on Android. But the UX is so kludgey! My main beefs

- Refresh requires two clicks instead of the now-standard pull down (like Chrome)

- Text resizing is _all_ _over_ _the_ _place_. I go to Reddit and the text shrinks down to size 3 or something. There is no clear way to make any adjustment whatsoever. Compare to Chrome/Chrome-clone Brave's very easy text resizing.

Why do I love firefox on android?

- Adblocking adblocking adblocking. Get rid of the absolutely garbage ad experiences that clutter up the majority of .com sites

- Extensions

- Zoom is easy versus other browsers

Have you tried the new browser, still called Firefox Preview on Android?

Pulling down to refresh is so annoying. Way too easy to trigger accidentally. I really prefer the Firefox way.

What makes you say they are abandoning it? I hope they change the name if it happens.

Edit: https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/27/mozilla-geckoview-firefox... is an article on this. It says Firefox Focus is being replaced. But Focus was not really a full featured browser and hasn't meant replace the normal Firefox on mobile. Confusing...

I literally run my browser in containers to achieve this. I still trust that more than letting the browser manage it. I call it ultra-private mode :)

A poor mans container (at least under unix-alikes) is simply running the program as another user with 'su' or 'sudo'.

That's too complicated. Use profiles for same result without having to use another user.

firefox -new-instance -P

I do this so frequently that I wrapped FF (and chrome) with a PyGTK starter, each profile with an icon. Less clicks to launch a new session of my preferred flavor

There use to be something called prism (not that one) that would do exactly this. The project was abandoned a few years ago sadly and I couldn't get it to work under a recent Ubuntu

For those unaware, this interface already exists this simply in the browser's UI (the difference being that your approach allows launching from desktop)

In FF each profile is a different directory (good) for Chrome I force it to specific user-settings so there is no cross contamination.

And yes, it's basically a trivial interface shortcutting that FF built tool.

You can also create and launch new profiles from a running instance of Firefox on the about:profiles page.

But modern tracking methods go far beyond whether not you’re actually logged into some site, I’m not sure how this is much of an improvement, your IP remains the same, your browser fingerprint is probably similar enough, if not identical, for them to track you regardless of whether you’re logged in. You only have to be logged in once on the machine from one container for all the other sites you visit in other containers to track you on any site that has a presence or tracking code associated with the one that you’ve logged into somewhere else.

> your IP remains the same

Not necessarily, e.g. you could use VPNs for some containers or randomize the ipv6 suffix.

I work remotely and use separate browsers for work and personal stuff. I was hoping Firefox would allow me to use one browser, but it didn't quite work out like I had hoped. There's no keyboard shortcuts, so you're forced to use mouse/menus (I did find an extension to open a new window in a container using shortcuts). I'm pretty sure history/cookies are global--I couldn't delete all cookies from a container (I think there's a ticket to better support this). I was hoping to close everything from a container when I'm not working and reopen it later...this seems to only work for the tabs in the current window.

It seems like a great feature. It's definitely a differentiator. Perhaps I had too specific of an approach going in. In general, for me tabs in a window are all related so flipping windows or closing windows are the context I switch between.

I use profiles for this, I work on secure stuff and can't afford to have any chance of mixing work and my personal computing adventures. Profiles are also extremely easy to use, but it does cost you 2X memory for the separate processes. Just throwing another option out there.

I wish Firefox had customizable shortcuts for everything, tabs, bookmarks, etc. It's just weird that you can't.

I just wish they had per-container proxy support. That would make me immediately switch to Firefox.

That's a really good idea. To achieve similar result, I am currently using multiple Firefox profiles which have different proxies configured. I also have separate profiles for social media. It wouldn't be bad if they made profiles work in the same way or with similar functionality like containers work (profile per tab, each tab uses different proxy etc.).

Ideally, I'd love to have Firefox handle the whole proxying or even networking part. Like have each Firefox profile use different network gateway (useful when you want to route all network traffic trough VPN for example).

What's the use case for this? You can already configure different proxies to apply to different domains. The UX isn't great though, you have to use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config

Not GP, but it seems like a great idea to me. Using different proxies you can have a different IP address for each profile, making tracking more difficult.

I haven't tried this, but you can try: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/sidebery/

It claims to allow you to set proxy settings per container.

Problem with containers is that they don't work in anonymous mode (at least last time I tried them they didn't).

There is some sort of other setting you have to enable to get them to work in anonymous mode, something like "enable extensions in private mode" or something. Even then it only worked on my old computer, when I set up my new computer and enabled the setting and it didn't seem to "take" and I didn't fiddle around with it to fix it. The other option is installing an extension that simply deletes cookies when you close a tab.

I confirm. I never used containers before, and when I tried, I discovered it wouldn't work with how I configured firefox, which is always ON private mode.

I think the best way to do that is to keep the browser data directories completely separate by using the --user-data-dir option in chrome (--profile in firefox)

Didn’t know Firefox has this ability, it’s the reason why I have to stuck with Chrome ever since. Couples of click to switch profile and that’s it.

Chrome supports multiple profiles, and you can seamlessly switch between them using Ctrl-Shift-M and the "Open link as" context menu entry.

You can't mix tabs from multiple profiles in the same window, though. And they don't share extensions etc. They're much heavier weight than containers.

Good point, but one of the key aspects about Firefox's implementation is that you can have different container tabs within the same window. As far as I know, that's still not possible with Chrome.

FF also has multiple profiles feature. But nothing matches Containers. Containers are different. Containers keep only the identity data (sesssion, cookies etc.) separate. All other data is shared. Profiles are painful. History, Password Manager, Bookmarks all are accessible and shared across FF containers. This makes it really useful.

There are people who swear by Chrome’s profiles, then there are people who swear by Firefox’s containers. I’m in the former category. I’ve learned through various debates that as always, you’re not gonna convince anyone on the other side.

I don't think you can use them to automatically sequester urls to certain profiles though? That's a serious limitation for my use - eg. I always want gmail to open in my logged-in 'engoogled' container, and never want plain google searches to be logged in. I don't want to manually enforce those rules (that's what computers are for).

It doesn't protect from fingerprinting your machine using WebGL (whose main purpose is to extract data about video card), canvas (main purpose of canvas is to check what fonts you have and how they are rendered), screen size, OS and IP address and TTL of IP packets.

Then you carelessly enter your non-temporary email address or phone number to get an order from a shop and the shop links your fingerprint to your offline identifiers. Now you cannot escape from tracking anymore.

Fingerprinting is real. For example, a site of government services for Moscow has fingerprinting code and users log into it with their real name.

You can use containers or private mode but your fingerprint stays the same and uniquely identifies you. Disable WebGL, canvas, accessing non-default fonts from browser, reading OS name and screen size right now and vote for disabling it by default if you don't want to be tracked.

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