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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough.

The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.

It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)

lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.

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And for those who do actually feel they want to separate their extensions and passwords and such as well, there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...

But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

> there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly

Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!

I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.

And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.

I'm really looking forward for these updates

I've been using the silly hack of using two versions of Firefox side-by-side (so, multiple browsers but they are both Firefox today), one which is Default in the OS and focuses on a single profile and Container Tab management. The other launches into the ProfileManager at startup to choose a Profile and doesn't pick up random links because it isn't Default.

Better Profile Management tools may be nice to see. Maybe I won't need dueling builds of Firefox. Or maybe I'll keep it, we'll see.

Finally, it only took them 10 years to get around to updating that decades old UI. Wonder which other decade old UI parts are they gonna tackle next? ooh, will they finally do something about Library and the whole bookmarks/history menu/sidebar/window mess? It's a little insane how so much time has passed and so many versions were released, and some interface stuff still remains unpolished and disparate. Firefox simply can't get it together on that front.

For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.

As a consultant, switching between my many clients, testing, and home accounts is simply Alt+F+B+Arrow down ("Open new container tab"), all within the same UI, in the same window, with colored tabs, with the same extensions, and same password manager.

I've been in situations needing up to half a dozen different Microsoft accounts (multiple Teams clients in Firefox, for instance), other browsers haven't solved this daily use-case for me.

It's an easier account management tool.

"Shared everything", is exactly what's undesirable about container tabs and what makes them a non-starter. I'd like to keep work actually separate. I don't need work tabs, or work history, or work downloads polluting the "main" profile. I don't need work extensions to be active outside of work. (there's just no way to make some extensions to work with just specific containers, so that's a dud.) All of that stuff can be in it's own space, and it would also make switching a bit easier - open profile, resume tabs, close profile, things stay put and ready to pick up where you left off, without needing to juggle tabs within the same profile and having them be an eyesore, be it work stuff on a regular profile or vice versa.

there's also ctrl+.1 etc (ctrl period and then a number, first container is 1)

So what browser do you use that solves this properly and allows full adblocking?

Oh god please no. Chrome's history/bookmarks UI is awful.

Safari has recently added Profiles which are very similar: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105100

OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.

Chrome supports multiple profiles

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

If I remember correctly, these are profiles in the same sense this term is used in Firefox - i.e. a global setting that can be switched, but applies to all active browser windows at the time. So you can't use it to (easily) browse different websites in different profiles side by side.

In Safari, "profiles" are a per-window thing, and there are facilities to open a website in a different profile etc, so effectively they work much more like Firefox containers (which are even more fine-grained tho: per-tab).

Chrome allows you to open multiple profiles simultaneously. I think Firefox can do that these days too, but for a while it's why I was using Chrome.

I'd been using Firefox for my work device for years but I only discovered containers and how awesome they are. My company was acquired and we still use microsoft accounts for different purposes. Jira works with this account, but sharepoint works with that account. Can't be logged in with the same azure account at the same time, but with containers, I can. It's great.

It is really useful to log on different aws account at the same time too.

If you haven't checked out the "AWS SSO Containers" extension they you are missing out! I recently found this beauty and it's literally changed the way I work. I couldn't be happier.

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

Yes I know about it but I try to limit the extensions I use to:

- the ones that are built by Mozilla

- the ones that are endorsed by Mozilla

- the ones I take time to read the code (and usually disable auto-updates)

I haven't had time to do the later for aws-sso-containers. Thanksfully I don't have that many account to work on at the same time these days so I didn't push it high in the priority list.

I have 4 Microsoft accounts I use regularly for work. I also do some consulting and often end up with credentials provisioned at a client (don't get me started on this).

It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).

Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.

I live in the AWS console for work and am constantly switching between accounts. The "AWS SSO Containers" extension has been a godsend for me. I used to use Chrome profiles for this but it was very clunky and only allowed access to a limited number of accounts at a time. Firefox container tabs allow me to access simultaneously all of my AWS accounts, in one window, automatically. It literally made my work life better.

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

Agree, container tabs are the killer app

I agree on the desktop version (Windows), but Android's getting crappier by the time.

Recently, many sites won't fix the viewport horizontally. Why such a major bug happens is baffling

Are autoplay YouTube embeds still a thing?

Not if you run uBlock Origin they aren't.

That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)

Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.

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