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Comment by ubercow13 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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