Multi-Account Containers Add-on on Mozilla VPN

You can use different VPN providers per-container-type; go to manage containers, select your container type, then click on Advanced proxy settings (last option); there you can input a proxy address.

For testing, you can just type the SOCKS5 address from your VPN provider, but that's not very secure.

In my case, I have a Pi running a few Dockers (with network pairs of OpenVPN/WireGuard + Socks5 proxies); it works decently enough, I can even use streaming services like Netflix / etc. if that's something you care about.

I use Firefox and don't use containers, but I have a friend who can't use Firefox because it doesn't have multiple profiles.

Chrome can create multiple browser windows that are isolated from each other, making a very clear distinction of scope.

Firefox has containers, chromium has profiles. They accomplish the same goals is sightly different ways.

Because Google doesn't want you to have privacy and avoid tracking. They are in the camp that wants more of it, and they want to control it fully on the entire world wide Web.

Your work’s VPN might have a strict policy against split tunnel VPN clients. Or they might have narrowly defined lists of IP blocks they split for bandwidth purposes (e.g. Microsoft’s O365 blocks to reduce teams bandwidth). If you think about it a split VPN tunnel with a default route to the internet effectively makes your client a bridge between your internal corporate network and the rest of the world. A bridge that browses the web and installs downloaded binaries.

Just something to look into since it could get you spanked by your net or sec team if your company has those.

Except that the behavior of creating a new tab via the + button vs. CMD+T (in Mac) is that one of them creates a tab in the active container and one of them does not. This is a dealbreaker for me and kills the hype.

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...

Lost revenue most likely.

Containers are plumbed throughout Gecko. It's not trivial to add, but it's not intractable either. Somebody has to be willing to put in the effort, more than anything.

Google have incentive not to implement it because of they earn $$$$$$ from tracking ads.

I suspect that account containers in Firefox has very, very low uptake. Why? Because it's a feature that is difficult to understand - it has nuance to it. Just understanding what it does for you requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of how browsers work, and how websites work. If uptake is low, it makes sense that Google would not prioritize the feature. As a happy coincidence, this also keeps the maintstream web in place, a relatively simpler mental model for ad tech software devs working on the web, where your starting point is a user browser capable of moving small strings between origins without the user's knowledge or consent.

Which leads me to the idea that maybe the feature should be better motivated! Perhaps we can show the user a meaningful and well-defined number, comparing for example the sheer size of a normal request vs one made in a container. If necessary, you can dig deeper into the payload, and ask questions of the system like, "What are they saying about me and my activity, using my own browser as a communication channel?" This latter one could be quite fun and take community contributions, small code snippets that know how to parse a request and interpret and display the meaning to the user.

This is where the imagination of a developer can be helpful, to basically characterize as completely as possible the patterns we expect to see. Because so far, that's a very low-level mechanism, and clearly there's more room for protocols - and given the nature of this problem, multiple, overlapping, dynamic protocols that are proprietary in nature. We can imagine origins that just suck everything in, doing unknown processing on that data, but giving us tools to measure aggregate engagement. The need to define an audience on something more than source IP becomes immediately apparent, and permissive 3rd party cookies have enabled a huge ecosystem to arise, and each persistent part of that is specialized in some way. But the money is in showing users ads, and showing them really useful ads. This means measuring the users and trying to anticipate their needs. We can base this on "identity" facts that don't vary much over time, or on "behavior" facts that vary a lot over time, albeit with lots of consistency for most of it. Both are used to predict what a user wants enough to spend money on. In particular, behavior, what are they asking about, learning about? What sorts of tools and supplies - things you can buy - are associated with the subject?

TBH if this happened on the client side, I wouldn't find it creepy at all; I'd find it quite useful. There are really two problems with server side processing of identity and behavior: first, it quickly gets bigoted when people are asked to associate an identity with a consumer demand. Who gets to make this association? Are we okay with this being a self-reenforcing mechanism since we are pushing identities toward the behaviors we associate with their stereo-type? Second, it lets servers split the internet without our knowledge. The incentive to garner as much attention as possible leads inevitably to breaking our shared perception of the world. At least, back in the day, you could argue with someone over a book, and know you have read the same book. But now, the book is a screen, basically a browser, and it is very different for each individual, and no-one is fully aware of this truth.

I'm being utterly serious when I say that these are the kinds of issues, technical and philosophical, that users need to be aware of before they can get excited about a feature like tab containers. Given the level of civic discourse in the wider world, my hope that people would be open to learning about it is slim to none. Heck, even most devs prefer not to think about it, and just make the changes the money wants to make, without regard to the users benefit. Then of course there is the secondary market for this data, law enforcement. You could probably get 80% of a panopticon by just hoovering Google analytics data for "alternative" processing. You get the rest by piggy-backing Cloudflare and the like. The interesting thing about CF and other CDNs is that they can provide an alternate, and unavoidable, surveillance function, since they can use access logs, and you cannot use the software without getting the bytes. This ends up being a strong argument in favor of content-addressable resources, rather than named resources: they would let a client rotate physical access, and these segmented logs would make it hard to recreate a coherent timeline. But not impossible: if enough sources cooperated, the could aggregate their logs and you'd lose your anonymity.

No, what the world needs is not just a defensive thing like tab containers, but a more aggressive thing. Rather than isolate an account's data, why not provide all the connectivity it wants, but poison the well. Manipulate the messages sent out by your computer to mislead these trackers: shift identities, access different resources, do different things in those resources. It should look identical to ordinary host lookup traffic, but the messages will be different, noisy, worse than useless. Maybe call them "active defense containers".

Even though I'm using Container Proxy myself, you can almost do the same thing with the official plugin (Manage Containers -> Click any Container -> Advanced proxy settings).

I didn't find that unusable...you just have to add all the sub domains to the same container. Usually it isn't very many.

I use the "no container" default for work stuff, which means everything just works normally. Anything that isn't a tool for work, that gets a container.

I use Containerise[0] (not affiliated) exactly for that purpose but I agree, this should really be included in the official plugin.

[0]: https://github.com/kintesh/containerise

I'm guessing [feature] means routing happens through Firefox vpn.

It's not mentioned in their post, but Mozilla VPN is a brand/browser integration of Mullvad, which is excellent, so that's what they're using underneath the branding.

Please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You may not feel that you owe deprivers of Android extensions better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

Or iOS extensions. All browsers should stop calling them “Web Extensions” if they arr never going to be available to the majority of the web users.

I just use this feature and it works for most of the extensions that I want to use: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Still can't believe we live in a world where iOS has web extensions before Android does

While I agree with most of your points, I don't want Firefox to implement uBlock Origin.

Should Firefox prioritize compatibility with it? Yes. Should the uBlock Origin developers have the personal cell phone of Mozilla's CTO? Also yes. But there's nothing to be gained from absorbing it, and all we'll get is more bureaucracy.

If anything, I'd like Firefox to focus more on their core product, not less.

They derive nearly 90% of their revenue from allowing Google to be the default search engine. Default uBlock is an impossibility. If you’d like Firefox with that feature, try the LibreWolf fork.

Maybe not integrating it, but allowing uBlock Origin to use Firefox Sync and sync filter lists and other settings would be very useful on Firefox for Android:

* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage#firefox...

> Firefox for Android can't sync extensions settings. This is tracked in Bugzilla #1316442.

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1316442