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Comment by freehorse | Hacker News Reader

> Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite

What is better depends on the use case. For me, containers are magic, because I can be logged into eg 2-3 different microsoft accounts simultaneously in the same window. With profiles or other browsers I would need to open a different window for each, which would be unnecessary and impractical. This is extremely convenient for me, containers is the feature I cannot currently browse without. Sometimes "separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite" may be exactly what you may need.

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This combined with "Always Open Site in Container", that pins a site to a specific container makes it almost invisible to me when moving between profiles.

I have several sites I only want to open with specific profiles and this workflow is a pain with Chrome. (click link with wrong profile, copy url, close tab, open a new browser, select profile, paste url, open site with correct profile.)

I really like the "Always Open Site in Container" along with "Limit to Designated Sites" once it's set up, but I wish there was a way to make it accept wildcards otherwise I have to manually add localhost:8080, localhost:8081, etc. Manually adding a dozen or more becomes painful.

Does the Containerise extension do what you want? I've used it in the past for wildcard subdomains but not for ports.

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

I have come across that one, but not having the "trusted" badge in the extension store has usually been a hard pass for me. I might reconsider.

It’s so odd that there is no way to edit the list of sites manually. Now, the only way to ”Always Open Site in Container” is to first browse to that page. That’s not just inconvenient for batch edits, what’s worse is that you can end up in a redirection deadlock, with no chance to edit which container the first url should open in.

I find that for dev workflows (even outside firefox containers) to not mix up badly, you end up needing to split localhost anyway - so for example, binding to specific IPs inside 127.0.0.1/8 (it's a whole /8, you're usually not running out of that), or, depending on how badly you need ::1/IPv6 bindings, service.localhost6 or service.localhost6.localdomain6 style names instead of just localhost.

Agree, containers are exactly what I want and I use them all the time. Profiles are too much isolation, like installing separate VMs to run processes in a completely isolated way when something like Docker is fine.

The key element here is switching windows across profiles. Safari almost gets this right but fails in the UI imho. Edge has "workspaces" that could almost work but they don't provide isolation.

Zen [0] can bridge that gap. I have it set up so that each workspace in practice maps to a specific container.

[0] https://zen-browser.app/

Yes, Zen is extremely good at that. Alas, as it is using Firefox Sync it doesn't sync your sidebar states (yet).

Today is the day I no longer need to open a private browser to manage Entra. Thank you stranger, thank you very much

My biggest struggle with containers is that I constantly accidentally shift out of them without noticing. I never remember that the default "new tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the current container.

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