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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps someone can build a container system around chrome (or in fact any application). Ideally, an OS should be able to do something like this.

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On linux, just create a separate login and use Chrome there. In fact, what I do is create a separate user, start Chrome once, do any configuration I want and then create a tarball of the separate user's home directory. Then to start a fresh it's just a wipe of the whole directory and unpack the tarball again.

It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.

I call it Groundhog Day Mode.

On Linux you could do the same with mount namespace without making a separate user etc.

Or you can just use Firefox.

I used to do this on Firefox, it's where I learnt the trick (before some sites made it necessary to use Chrome, and before Firefox had containers).

This loses substantial affordances Firefox containers give you (eg, right click->open in container, always open domain in container, access to bookmarks etc)

The way Firefox style containers work they need to be "built into" not "built around". It's not as much about creating a profile and running it separately (that's just standard profiles in Chrome/Firefox, or normal OS level sandboxing) as it is auto-launching webpage requests into that profile based on matches and integrating the profiles into the app UI so the tabs stand out, can co-exist in the same window, and can be managed via built in tab creation UI.

Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.

Why not use the native user profile function? E.g. set up a “user profile” dedicated to access only Meta/Facebook properties (and therefore only be able to track you within that container)

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