Hacker News Reader

Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

These are pretty good, but the Chrome implementation is better. Specific complaints: - can't tie a bookmark to a container. - too many clicks to open a new tab in a container (in Chrome the whole window stays tied to the container, not just the tab) - bookmarks and history aren't container-scoped.

View on HN

Are you referring to Chrome's profiles? Because Firefox's counterpart to that is Firefox profiles, not containers. Firefox profiles are clunkier to launch & use though (like a hidden feature that has rebuffed all my attempts to streamline their management, as if by design). Type 'firefox -P -no-remote' to start with firefox profiles.

IMO containers and profile functionalities shouldn't be mixed. Containers are a lightweight version of Profiles. Running 2 profiles is essentially running 2 separate browsers running with separate histories, add-ons, bookmarks, settings. A bit like threads vs processes.

The use case for containers is totally different from the use case for profiles. The whole point of this feature is that you can have all of the cookies and persistent storage of a tab or set of tabs sandboxed, without affecting your actual browser history or bookmarks.

If you want that, use profiles.

>too many clicks to open a new tab in a container

The configuration for this is really simple. There's even extensions like "temporary container tab" that will give you a fresh container with one click.

I'm not sure what you're getting at regarding profiles. Chrome "personas" seem to be much like Firefox containers, but somewhat easier to use. Don't Firefox profiles require restarting the browser?

I guess I am not smart enough to figure out the simple configuration you mention.

Also, it's annoying and a bit scary (for bugs) that this is an extension rather than being built into the browser.

It is built into the browser. The extension is just the UI to access it.

I have to install an extension to use it. With Chrome, I do not.

It's an extension written by Mozilla that is using APIs built into the browser. The extension is just a bit of UI to make the feature accessible.

I understand that, but why is it done that way? It's extra work to install it, and the fact that it's an extension probably means that it's not tested as well as normal browser UI. I really hate using extensions because I like to keep my software plain vanilla as possible to avoid strange bugs.

Because it's not the sort of feature that 90% of Firefox users would care much about. If you aren't aware of what it is and managed to accidentally activate it, you'd probably get really confused why you had to keep logging back into facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com