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Comment by darrenf | Hacker News Reader

I use profiles not containers, and have links opening using the correct profile by wrapping stuff with the `BROWSER` environment variable. For example my Signal.desktop launcher contains this line

    Exec=env BROWSER='firefox -P personal' signal-desktop -- %u

For other apps I use `firefox -P work`, e.g. a shell alias for AWS SSO.

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Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work to make Thunderbird open links in a particular Firefox profile due to this 21 year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216252.

This is a really cool trick, but the nice thing about containers is that you can do this based on where the link is going rather than where the link is coming from.

As I don't use them, I wonder if you can combine the two? So that every source is contained and each destination is contained as well. Might get a bit annoying with somethings, but.

Yes, you can. I use both. My personal profile & work profile are different, and have different container settings.

I use profiles because I want state isolated for my purpose, not per web origin. So for example, I may need to visit google sites related to my employer's Gsuite, or my personal account used with GMail and phone, or as an anonymous user.

This also means that I have become somewhat resistant to scripted UI integrations. I don't really want my apps or sites calling willy-nilly into each other. I want _links_ which I can deliberately copy/paste into different profiles depending on my goals. E.g. do I want to visit someone's Google drive shared link as my personal account, work account, or anonymously so it doesn't pollute either of my drive UIs?

You could set BROWSER to a script which takes a URL on its command line, uses zenity to pop up a dialogue box showing it to you, with a button for each browser profile, then opens it in the selected one. With buttons for "Do not open", "Copy to clipboard", etc.

Just the dialog box with $1 should suffice. I do this on Windows. I can copy it to whichever appropriate browser, or simply dismiss it. I have my terrible source code somewhere on the Internet, but it should take less than couple femtoseconds for any HN readers to write their own, I suppose. I recommend everyone do this.

I have considered doing exactly this on many occasions but have never gotten around to putting it together - though I hadn't considered using Zenity.

I think a polished packaged cross platform app that does this would have some audience -akin to the intent dialogues on android & ios.

You could set BROWSER to a script which inspects the URL and dispatches to the right profile. This would be mildly awful but extremely unixy.

I thought Signal-desktop was electron-only. Are you running it on Firefox, or is this something else.

I think this is about where the Signal App opens links you click within it. So all links opened in Signal always open in their personal Firefox profile for example

Yes, exactly that.

Aah, thanks a lot. I’ve been using Junction on KDE for this, which shows a selection screen for links clicked elsewhere.

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