Hacker News Reader

Comment by slickdork | Hacker News Reader

I've been using this for a few years now and love it. I wish for two things.

1) i wish there was a way to automatically delete cookies/cache/history from specific containers every time. My personal container needs cookies and logins saved. My other containers don't need persistent cookies.

2) I've always wished for protonvpn to apply to only specific containers. Reading this now though, I see firefox's VPN does that so that's very cool, I might need to look into their vpn.

View on HN

What you want is the Temporary Containers addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

It will let you open containers that trash cookies on close. You can also set certain URL's to always open in a tmp container which is useful for sites that only let you read x amount of article per month.

How is it different/better from incognito mode ?

incognito shares state between tabs. temporary containers can have a fresh container for every tab, so your tabs are isolated. you can also use it in a way that by default every site you visit is using a temporary container, with certain urls set to use their corresponding long term containers -- if i go to github, it opens in a github container, if i click a link to some random dev's site, it opens in a temp container, etc.

to provide context, i still use incognito, but i consider incognito mostly about hiding things from myself -- i use it almost exclusively for porn, because i don't want my porn habits in my browser suggestions. temporary tabs still land in the recent urls and such.

You keep your browsing history for one but clear the cookies out after automatically.

Incognito isn't as private as the name suggests. I was surprised one day to open a tab in Incognito and see the site I visited knew who I was. That's because I had logged in to a related site in a tab I'd forgotten about in another Incognito window.

My assumption up to then was that each newly opened Incognito tab or window was it's own private session, but this turned out to be wrong - they all share state, as if you had one separate but shared profile called Incognito. This was a little upsetting as I'd been using Incognito for years without realising the data sharing going on.

Temporary Containers does what I'd expected from Incognito. Each new temporary container has its own isolated cookies etc from all the others. So now I open a TC when I want to visit a site without identity or tracking, or to login temporarily with a different account, and don't use Incognito at all.

For what it’s worth, Safari’s incognito mode works exactly how you described it — separate session for each incognito tab/window.

So you can't open two tabs for the same site and share the session between them?

Correct, not in the private browsing mode.

Some websites are able to detect running in incognito mode because some browser APIs are disabled there, but not in temporary containers

You can restart your browser without losing what's it your incognito windows.

So it stores full state when the application is closed, that's a long way off "incognito". Was it always like that?

I expressed myself poorly. In retrospect it sounds like the exact opposite of what I meant, in fact.

What I meant is if you open what you would otherwise open in an incognito window in a container instead, you can restart your browser without those tabs being closed and the respective state being lost.

i use this, it sounds like in a way inverted from the way you do -- i have containers for any site that i want to maintain persistence on, then default to a tmp container

I use this and it works well. You can also add a prefix to your temporary containers. I prefixed mine with “Mr. Meseeks #<Container Number”, which made it pretty hilarious if you also use the “kill tab after time” setting: Mr. Meseeks tabs closing in the background, completing their purpose.

Auto Tab Discard[0] add-on if you don’t want the tab to be lost but want to reclaim your memory and cpu cycles

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

In regards to #1 - we have a feature (WIP right now) that adds the ability to delete data (cache, cookies and local storage) per container. Look for that in a future release.

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/pull/249...

Oh wonderful, this will be a very welcome feature for me. :) thanks!

Is there any way to change the keyboard shortcuts on the Multi Account Containers? Cmd+Alt+. is the default shortcut for 1Password on Linux.

Yes. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-extension-shortc...

Cookie AutoDelete is great for custom site-specific cookie policies and is container-aware, see

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

thanks, i installed this. I couldn't find a way to set it to 'always delete everything from container x and never anything from container y' though.

The rules are container-specific, but you need to enable this feature first, it is off by default.

Settings -> Extension Options -> Enable Support for Container Tabs

I combine containers with profiles to achieve this... I have totally separate profiles for: 'temp' (delete everything on close) 'shopping' (containers for my common stores) 'finance' (containers for banks, etc)

Gives a lot of flexibility, and I'm a lot less nervous opening stuff in 'temp' session when I know everything else is safely in totally different profiles/directories.

The Mozilla VPN is a relabelled service by Mullvad VPN.

It has its own client application so it's a little more than simply relabelling a product. I find Mozilla client easier for less techy people so I guess both products complement themselve by targeting a different subset of the population.

You can take care of #1 the way people here suggested, but I believe you can also do it backwards by having firefox delete ALL cookies at exit and whitelisting some domain's cookies. (Cookies sand Site data, check "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" and hit Manage Exceptions right next to it to whitelist some domains)

For #2 you do not need Firefox's VPN service. I am using it with wireguard and a socks5 proxy on the other end. I have a 'proxy' container configured but you can have more than one container with proxy as well. (In advanced proxy settings the syntax is socks://10.0.99.82:1080 )

You can apply a per container proxy, so if you run a proxy that goes through your vpn, you could do this with protonvpn. I do this with a ssh tunnel.

for 1) do look into the temporary containers extension.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com