News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?.

Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by brudgers on Monday August 17, 2015 @09:36AM (#10072826)
Jails for cookies, history, etc.

I want to be able to stay logged into Google/Facebook/Linkedin for convenience without other browser tabs knowing anything about it...or isomorphically, I want to be able to browse the internet while logged into those services without the pages I am browsing leaking data back to those sites. I'll take the hit of downloading 100k of jquery on my 20mbit pipe a few extra times.

I want my browser to sandbox my information to the same degree I can achieve by running separate browsers or setting up special browsing VM's.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by knome on Monday August 17, 2015 @09:46AM (#10072887)
Wouldn't creating a second user in chromium do what you want here? You could have a specific "social media" user.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by brudgers on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:08AM (#10073029)
I'm not sure what you mean. If this involves "sign in to Chromium" then that seems to involve signing in to Google, and that sort of defeats the purpose.

Incidentally, Chromium is what I use for Facebook...and only Facebook, on this particular computer. And signing into Chromium with my Google account seems to me to be a big information leak.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by yincrash on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:47AM (#10073325)
Chrome/chromium has the distinction of user profiles[1]. You can have separate windows have separate profiles (but not separate tabs). This has nothing to do with Google accounts. Each profile has their own 'jail' of chrome resources (cookies/history/tabs/etc). This is really useful when you need multiple persisting sessions while doing web dev or whatever else.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/multi-profiles

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by brudgers on Monday August 17, 2015 @11:41AM (#10073720)
Thanks. The command line can be used to launch Chromium with a specific user profile as described here:

https://superuser.com/questions/377186/how-do-i-start-chrome...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by bwohlergo on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:00AM (#10072971)
to achieve what he said he'd need one user per browser tab...

you do realize that facebook etc still track you, even if you're logged out, right?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by VOYD on Monday August 17, 2015 @01:52PM (#10074814)
as can google, and every other major player.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser? by samuellb on Monday August 17, 2015 @01:12PM (#10074505)
In the meantime I can recommend the RequestPolicy[1] add-on for Firefox. It's not exactly what you're asking for; it blocks cross-domain requests entirely instead. Since it uses a whitelist you'll have to add exceptions for the sites you use (images and stylesheets are often placed on a different domain). This takes a bit of time but I think it's worth it.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/ (the developer happens to have the same lastname as my firstname, but we're not related in any way)

[ Parent | on HN ]