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Comment by throwaway914 | Hacker News Reader

The real gem of Firefox is Containers. No other browser has something like this. It's something critically missing from Chrome. I don't mean "Just create a private window", I mean being able to create 1 + infinitely many profiles/containers. Firefox has an extension called Temporary Containers that makes this better: Every new tab is a temporary, ephemeral container. By default I get isolation. I have it configured so if I hold Ctrl and click a link it will open in the same existing container (in a new tab). If I want sessions to "join" I can do that, but I get defense/privacy by default.

There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.

There are many benefits to Chrome and it's dev tools, and I respect the Firefox mission more for all the shit Mozilla has done. But I'm bound to Firefox regardless of the pros and cons because it's the only browser that can do this.

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I had to do a minor presentation a few days ago, involving logging into several different AWS accounts. The main content of my presentation went absolutely under the radar because the audience were way more interested in how I was able to open and switch between multiple AWS accounts in different tabs. I use another add-on that automatically creates new containers for AWS accounts launched from the SSO screen. And if I type 'gmail' in the browser, it lists my 3 accounts, and depending on which one I choose, it opens it in the correct container so I can have all three open simultaneously, without any messing around.

I was deploying out past phrases in a password manager to our company.

My presrntation was definitely undercut by the methods I use to browse the internet, and using an HDMI adapter direct to iPhone.

To them… it was like I fired up a custom rolled Linux distro from 20 years in the future and used minority report hand controls on it.

Really set some expectations for me on my next presentation.

Could you elaborate on the browsing methods?

Trust me, nothing you would be impressed about.

Middle click to open tab, control C in a password manager, and then remember a minute later to paste it where it belongs, switching between tabs quickly, getting an SMS, and only glancing at it quickly enough to remember the number and type it in.

It's amazing how such normal every-minute tasks for tech people like us are freaking wizardry to the average user. Whenever I'm on my home office PC and on the phone with anyone in my family, they make some comment about how my typing sounds like a machine gun or something.

Ooooh, what addon for the AWS SSO?

I'm not near my laptop right now but I think it's just called "AWS SSO Containers". And I also use containerise (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/) to pattern match urls to tabs

I tried using containers for a while, and found them to be severely lacking.

One example: You can't edit a container's site list, you can only add the currently loaded FQDN to it. So, you can't for example assign *.google.com to your Google container, you can only add each individual subdomain, and only after loading it.

Worse, if a host you want to add is part of a redirect chain, there seems to be no way to add it at all. For example, mail.google.com redirects you to accounts.google.com which quickly redirects you back to mail.google.com. There is no way to get accounts.google.com added to the list. As a result of this, the "Limit to designated sites only" feature is completely unusable. (And the only reason these problems exists is because Mozilla in its infinite wisdom has decided that an Add button and a text input in the sites list would be too much for us lowly users.)

Another common annoyance I had was the inability to clear cookies and site data for a given container only (or for the default container without affecting any named containers).

In the end I just bought more RAM and went back to using separate profiles.

Yeah I've had the same experience. I tried to go all-in on automated containers. I curated long regex lists to make sure things grouped the way I wanted. Ultimately it just didn't really work. The major problems I hit were:

- Complex cloud services with many domains. Microsoft Office 365 uses such a bewildering collection of domains... I wound up just doing all MSFT stuff in edge. Google has similar issues.

- explicit rules are too brittle. I wish it could dynamically recommend a tab family to use based on content or similar.

- hard to manage. I wound up with dozens and dozens of temp container that buried my persistent, named containers. That made me rely more on the filtering rules, which required a lot of maintenance and tweaking.

Your assessment is similar to mine. Firefox appears to have done a lot of the under the hood work necessary to bring a cool feature like this to their product, but then completely stopped working on anything beyond a rudimentary UI.

I'm worried they will remove it, like Panorama, because I'm sure there is some code there that needs to be maintained but is low importance (otherwise they would develop it further).

> You can't edit a container's site list, you can only add the currently loaded FQDN to it. So, you can't for example assign *.google.com to your Google container, you can only add each individual subdomain, and only after loading it.

The Containerise addon lets you do both, thoug it hasn't been updated in a few years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/

I still find it amazing and love it. It does 90% of what I want from a silo'd experience. Sure it would be nice to have more but nothing else comes close unless you want to run multiple instances gobbling up even more ram than tabs and juggling those. I manage cookies with cookie autodelete which does much of what I want for cookie management.

I prefer to use separate profiles. Containers are cool but degrade performance.

It seems like Sidebery is what you want. Lets you use regex matching for containers.

> It's something critically missing from Chrome

Adding Containers to Chrome would be largely pointless - because Google anyway has access to everything. It's like adding a VPN to Android and then still using Map and everything while logged with your Google a/c. Chrome by design has no privacy.

I know many of us (if not all) are already aware of this (or something on this lines) but this is important to make this distinction when talking about Firefox and Chrome in one breath.

Comparing Chrome and Firefox when it comes to privacy is apples and oranges. I know you were not directly doing that but I still thought it is important to be noted.

Sidenote: I thought Brave was BS because I had the first impression it was purely funded by watching ads and earning crypto. You opt-in to this, it's not the default. They actually have an extensive list of modifications to disconnect the Chromium base from Google and provide better security. I would be using it if not for Containers in Firefox.

...while I agree about Chrome and probably kinda understand if you expand that notion to whole chromium...

Containers aren't for protection against browser - they protect one digital identity from leaking into another. And to be able to log in into multiple accounts at the same time

The Temporary Containers extension is unmaintained: https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers/issues/618

Terrible news about the maintainer, but is that a problem? If it works it works?

Are there any critical issues with this plugin?

I still use it. It's been working fine for me bug free. They must have been a good developer.

It leaves the containers behind when I use it so my container list is polluted with all of the temporary numbered containers. It stops me using it when it can’t cleanly handle itself…

Probably Firefox sync, but most likely the extension. I’ll use it again once it works.

I launch FF in a shell function that first calls BleachBit and calls it again when FF terminates. Not sure if that would help your case but it works for me. The reason I do this from a shell function is to redirect the output of FF console to a ramdisk just in case I needed it but did not have it prior to seeing something odd.

There are options to define how container numbering is handled. Right in the General Tab. These settings work for me...

Container Number: Reuse available numbers

Delete no longer needed Temporary Containers: After the last tab in it closes

The containerise extension has pulled in most of the features of temporary containers and is still semi actively maintained.

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

https://github.com/kintesh/containerise

Thanks for pointing this out! I was using Containerise + Temp Containers. The "Default Container" section of Containerise has now replaced Temp Containers for me. In case anyone else is interested, here are my settings:

Default Container: On

Container Name: tmp_{domain}

Lifetime: Until last tab is closed

Rule Addition: *.{domain}.{tld}

Containers on Firefox are conceptually great but I find the UI/UX a bit lacking. I wish I could organise them as cleanly as Spaces in Arc.

I realized I didn't want to manage profiles, I just wanted separate containers by default. So that's why I use Temporary Containers. I don't maintain a "work profile" or "shopping profile", etc. When I need cookies or other data shared between tabs I will Ctrl + click to open a link in a new tab, with the same existing container.

Now, to organize tabs I use Tab Stash. I put things like 200+ YouTube music tabs in 1 group, 1-off projects in another, k8s stuff in another, job/career postings I need to complete in another, etc. Things that are temporary are shown under the default group at the top. This also allows me to keep most of my tabs "frozen" and out of memory/inactive while still keeping 400+ tabs open.

(Tab Stash is vertical tabs. Sidebery was the fastest, but Tab Stash has the grouping and inactive tab stuff I need)

I love containers for development. I configure a socks proxy for each of my development environments and it lets me run multiple copies of my services all on the correct domain names.

> The real gem of Firefox is Containers.

Amen Sister. One container for browsing. One for my shopping gmail, ebay and Amazon. One for my fake Facebook acct. One for my work gmail, work chat and related.

> There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.

I can use this literally yesterday for at least 3 separate issues I was facing.

Or even multiple containers for one service. E.g. multiple GMail accounts.

> But I'm bound to Firefox regardless of the pros and cons because it's the only browser that can do this.

You and me both. I can live in a decent house with decent neighbors. Or I can live in pretty decent house with neighbors who borrow my stuff without asking, whiz on my fence and meet in secret to figure out how to exploit me.

I use the Multi-Account-Containers addon for separate containers. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I had a fairly long back and forth with a service I pay for while using one of the many Firefox container extensions. They want to track me and a new profile every access they did not like because they begun fingerprinting for “security”. White listing didn’t work and I ended up having to install chrome for them.

It worked very well for the “you have three articles remaining” to view for free. Now I’m back to scrolling to the bottom of an article to make sure it doesn’t disappear into same login wall and see if reader view bypasses it before I start reading.

I think that Firefox containers is a great feature, use them all the time, and have no desire for using separate profiles. That said:

- They aren't exactly an easy to discover feature. There is a mention of the feature in the settings, but making use of them requires the use of an addon.

- Other people do have use cases for separate profiles. Most people wouldn't even know they exist unless they have used Firefox for an incredibly long time, and they aren't exactly easy for the typical person to use.

I don't think you need a separate extension for proxy per container support. They support Mozilla's vpn thing by default but it cam be changed to any other proxy. Syntax is something like socks:host:port though I am mot sure about the GUI support to set it. I think I set it as part of Multi Account Containers.

By the way I've heard an extension author say that containers are not required with the new strict isolation features.

Safari on OSX just added this.

Safari’s version of this also allows you to associate specific sites with specific profiles [0].

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212544#links

just a heads up on the privacy aspect: other than possible cross-site 0-days, tracking usually occurs with your browser fingerprint which by default doesnt change w/ Containers (its extremely hard to properly and accurately change it anyways, there are leaks even in the network layer) so it doesnt have too much of an effect except for unsophisticated ad networks/analytics

What are the added privacy benefits compared to Firwfox Total Cookie Protection, which is on by default? Ability to log in with different accounts in parallel is definitely very useful, but I'm looking for the privacy benefits compared to using Firefox without containers.

I wish you could have different settings profiles per-container but they are already quite useful just to isolate cookies.

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