Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

We use different AWS accounts for different purposes at work. It would be an extreme productivity loss if I had to go back to using something other than Firefox's containers.

View on HN

Hey if you haven't heard of Simple Tab Groups, also consider adding that to your setup:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

I use them both together and it's amazing.

Other than separate windows... is it very different if we use different Chrome user profiles to keep the saved logins, sessions, and cookies separate?

This does work. Not quite as nice as Firefox’s multi-account containers because tabs can’t co-mingle in the same window. But totally serviceable.

I use a combination of both every day at work.

I like chrome for some things too because you can make a single-site-browser window in chrome, so certain websites can be treated like first class applications in the alt tab menu.

> I like chrome for some things too because you can make a single-site-browser window in chrome, so certain websites can be treated like first class applications in the alt tab menu.

yes absolutely.

I did this for my local jupyter notebook server and pinned it to my taskbar. effectively works like a desktop app.

The amount of storage that these chrome profiles occupy on the hard disk is sometimes irksome. I have not compared it to Firefox though.

If you use AWS SSO, I wrote an extension to automatically change containers when you log in.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...

It's not an identical feature, but I have some workflows which require Chromium and compartmentalization between a multiple accounts, and Brave's profiles aren't a bad alternative.

For someone that hasn't used Brave in a while - what's the difference between Brave profiles and profiles in other Chromium browsers?

There may be other Chromium-based browsers which do this, but none that I use: on launch the user is (optionally) prompted with a profile selection tool, with additional options to create a new profile or go into a guest session. I appreciate this because without it I often end up wondering why something isn't behaving properly, and after a moment of confusion then realize I'm in the wrong profile.

It's not perfect, and I prefer Firefox's rules-driven containers, but for anything which requires Chrome I've found it sufficient.

Ah, that sounds nearly identical to the standard launch-time profile picker from the Chromium base - example from Chrome https://i.imgur.com/7b7YqUY.png

Sure is, thanks. At the time I settled on Brave for that use case I saw no such behavior from any of my other Chromium-based browsers. Either Brave upstreamed it, or I did something wrong on my end (likely).

Pretty sure the setting has been around for a while, possibly upstreamed from brave but I feel like it was around before then. It’s pretty hidden tho, and most ppl don’t want it and get confused why it even exists so it’s possible there isn’t great documentation on it.

In Firefox this prompt is invoked with "-P" argument.

Chrome itself has profiles, which I use for exactly the same use case (multiple AWS logins)

You're correct. It does, but the last time I tried it it does not prompt on launch as Brave can, which provides a nice reality check for my addled mind.

I dislike certain aspects of Brave for other reasons, but this is why I have an unholy number of browsers installed and end up making use of nearly all of them regularly, unfortunately.

The Arc browser [1] could be nice alternative as it handles profiles pretty smooth.

[1]: https://arc.net/

This site basically says nothing except "sign up".

I have heard so much about this browser from dev & tech podcasts and websites[1]. Those who use it really love it, I wish their website had a video demo at least.

This landing page has some screenshots at least https://students.arc.net/

[1]https://www.theverge.com/23462235/arc-web-browser-review

This smells like pure marketing, incl the company's website. I'd rather use an open-source browser like Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com