Works really well with Mullvad which has a SOCKS proxy setup only available when connected.

Great for work connections too, I've setup all work/business websites to auto-open in a "work" container which I've created a local bridge proxy for to ensure my work connections are always over the corporate VPN.

This is also really good if you consult or work with many customers - you can start to build a catalogue of containers with specific settings for those customers.

Container Proxy addon:

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

Granted, Tor tries to upstream as much as it reasonably can to FF, but there's still large differences in defaults that could give away (some bits of) your identity.

It's all baby steps. I don't expect to be fully anonymous this way, just like I know my current setup does not foil more sophisticated tracking.

This is my every-six-months wish/rant on this subject ...

What we need is the ability to 'jail' a GUI browser process.

It is too resource intensive to spin up an actual virtual machine to run a browser window/tab. However, a facility like 'jail' (or zones or, perhaps even Docker) that simply chroots a new process with its own network interface, etc., does not have any of that expense.

It really is just a fancy chroot and the expense is limited to the overhead of just the process you're running.

If you could 'jail' a GUI application, you could have a browser window that was not merely its own cookie domain or history domain, but that was on an entirely different network and it's own chroot.

Great for all kinds of silly GeoIP restrictions, too - in my part of the world, homedepot.com just spits out "access denied", a foodnetwork.com recipe you find in search results just redirects you to the tudiscovery.com homepage, etc.

I'm interested in your setup. Do you configure your router to have a point to point tunnel with Mullvad then? I didn't know this was a thing. Do you then just have a separate container proxy for each GeoIP region you want to access?

1. https://mullvad.net/en/servers/

On a USG the config looks like this:

    wireguard wg0 {
        address ***/32
        mtu 1420
        peer *** {
            allowed-ips 0.0.0.0/0
            endpoint ***:51820
        }
        private-key ***
        route-allowed-ips false
        up-command "ip route add 10.64.0.1/32 dev wg0 && ip route add 10.124.0.0/16 dev wg0"
    }

I'm uncertain of the benefit for everyday people.

For Geo-IP, unfortunately unless you have some sort of automation to reconfigure the OpenVPN settings on your router - this will only work with 1 configuration. They may be alluding to using the VPN to connect to another country where they're not getting weird as fuck redirects and shit content.

Although just as I wrote that, I'm expecting a dd-wrt/browser addon will probably support this somewhere - or at least as a script on Linux.

Traditional VPN solutions seem overengineered and complicated. Wireguard is better though

So they redirected me to the Dutch version because I'm in a nominally Dutch-speaking region, and I had no option to get it in English. I had to go with half-translated French until I noticed that I could replace the "fr" in the URL with "en", and actually get to an English-language website.

The region-based redirection was annoying enough, and the half-assed translation job was expected, but not even providing an easy way to get back to English is really idiotic.

I still wish I had some kind of system that would automatically use a connection in the right country for geoblocked content. For now I just use SSH proxies to (my own) strategically located servers combined with Firefox Containers and Container Proxies, but it's all manual.

Also, it seems to be using browser's preferred locale, not the IP region. So, it looks like that changed, too.

Google, on the other hand, is just as bad as you described. Geo-based localisation, lots of clicks to change the language (or ?hl=en, once you learn about it).

Since the list is not alphabetically ordered (it actually is, but with the English names, not the displayed names) and it shows no scrollbar, it wasn't obvious there would be other countries up there.

As for language, maybe Google itself chose to send me to the Dutch version. Despite all my attempts, I still cannot consistently get Google to use the language I want (apart from manually choosing it by directly visiting Google with the right hl= first, indeed). Right now Google.fr seems to be in English and offering me the three languages of Belgium, for some reason.

[0]https://i.imgur.com/nuAPsxD.png

One of the permissions you have to grant to the container proxy add on is:

“Access your data for all websites”

That’s not acceptable.

Like, allow some tracking & advertising for "shopping" container, but block it otherwise. I don't mind having a special self-curated image where my in-scope browsing is tracked and analyzed. Now, I just have a separate browser (Chrome) for this - because it's more straightforward and less error-prone.

Or a sandbox development & local resource management profile where nothing but localhost and LAN addresses are allowed. And then block such access for any other profile - for security reasons.

Or allow, let's say, Grammarly extension on a few selected websites (like HN), where all I write is public and I would benefit from machines aiding my writing without any privacy concerts, but don't give it any chance to see my private correspondence.

Unfortunately, that's not possible with containers, and profiles are quite cumbersome.

I use containers liberally also

edit: Apparently this is bad info. I'll have to give it a try again.

I believe that in the far past firefox-bin was the firefox binary, and firefox was a shell script that would do things like notice you already have a firefox-bin instance open and signal it to open a new window rather than launching a new firefox-bin instance.

But nowadays, firefox and firefox-bin seem almost the same. On the current release version on Mac, for example, both are binaries, with firefox-bin 40320 bytes and firefox just 16 bytes bigger.

Info.plist in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents gives firefox is the executable to run. I'm not sure what role firefox-bin has now, if any.

Grabbing the source and building it myself results in firefox and firefox-bin matching.

Linux was happy to open a new instance without the `--new-instance` option (which is implied by `--no-remote`), but macOS required it.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-boss/

Is there any reason to also use facebook container if you already have multi-account containers?

Worth mentioning that with the addon cookie auto-delete, you can more or less emulate temporary containers.

- I have a GitHub container

- github.com and gist.github.com are set to always open in the GitHub container

- Say I am currently browsing github.com in the GitHub container.

- If I click a link to a domain other than [gist.]github.com, instead of navigating my current tab to that url, the url will open in a new tab & new temporary container

This is more powerful than simply persisting cookies from github.com -- I'm keeping GitHub's cookies, but only in the github container. It's almost like first party isolation, but a little weaker (unless you enable the setting where any link to a different domain will open in a new container), and I have the ability to group sites that would break with 1st party isolation by opening them in the same container.

Everything else opens links in a new container with the hope to make it as close as possible to looking like a different person clicked that link. I know it won't work that well since the IP doesn't change nor the user-agent, but at least it helps with the most lazy tracking.

Discussion upthread made me interested to see whether I can route temporary containers through tor, to make this protection stronger — see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853320

It's not super high on my list of priorities though, probably won't get to it for a month or two.

I run big fleets, 100s of hosts 1000s of containers in most AWS regions. Most of the control plane is automated, but when that breaks, or there are issues in the data plane, I might log into read logs, look at metrics, force scaling actions, or just general investigation tasks.

I also use different accounts for permissions boundaries. Data shared between multiple teams might go in one account. The apps can access the data but maybe the interns can only access the app account while the SR. Eng(s) + current oncall have full read only access to the data for investigation. A second RW-Data oncall might have access to the DB account in each region. Ever data storage account also has a limited access cross account Data replication/backup account.

+ I help people out. 'Can you look at this? . . .'

In the end, there are account specific errors that can be caused in your infra, IAM rolls, keys, throttling, malicious access that are easily prevented with least access in per account buckets. So I end up with multiple accounts in each region.

so:

main-service_prod_us-east-1_dataStore

main-service_prod_us-east-1

main-service_test_us-east-1_dataStore

main-service_test_us-east-1

main-service_beta_us-east-1_dataStore

main-service_beta_us-east-1

* regions

Adds up pretty quickly.

Similar to OP you're replying to, I use Firefox Containers to open separate accounts to open independent windows from my Identity Provider when I need to be in more than one account at a time.

I do have scripts that spin up accounts as needed and I just have a bucket for 'free Tier account access ending' emails.

https://medium.com/@stoically/enhance-your-privacy-in-firefo...

The temporary containers extension is creating a temporary container with each newly opened tab. It uses same container for tabs opened from existing tabs.

https://github.community/t/using-one-account-for-all-your-pr...

Explore is one of my favorite features and now it’s crowded with work related suggestions. It makes it harder to separate the personal/professional persona and interests. This problem also manifests in notifications. I want a clear separation so I can focus on my personal life after work.

I’ve thought many times about creating a separate account.

Right now I manually type ?authuser=1 into my URLs to have Google Docs open in the right account, but this breaks when I restart the browser and the page reloads with the wrong account... Why Google removes this parameter from URLs after loading is beyond me.

Heck, we’re using outlook at one of my customers and I can’t even open a second tab in 2020. It will just block the UI telling me there is another tab open.

I do all my shopping in the shopping container. I have the deals website I frequent set to the shopping container so if I open slickdeals.net in any tab, I get to the shopping container.

One quality of life change I encourage is go to manage containers and select "Select a container for each new tab". Then you can pretend the firefox tab without a container even exists (caveat: does not work with ctrl + t shortcut for new tab)

> The nice bonus feature is you can have certain sites default to containers. I had a paid YouTube account for a while, for example, so having any YouTube link open in my personal account was nice for not getting hit with ads on initial click due to my default Gmail not being the right one.

And then when I click back to the work container and try to access mail.google.com I get:

"400. That’s an error.

The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That’s all we know."

Bug? It seems like a really messy UI. Why can't they make Multi-Account Containers work just like Facebook Container? Or have make 1 window == 1 container?

In my experience that had better support for per-eTLD temporary containers, so that each site can have its own, and the data can be discarded relatively soon. I also have more permanent containers for things that I want to be able to persist (e.g. work uses SSO so I need to link multiple sites together to log in).

When I used it I found the management in Multi-Account Containers to be onerous (I don't believe it could do automatic containers based on eTLD).

.. I say hopefully, man I feel guilty getting so much use out of these addons when I could be actively contributing. Fuck it, donating.. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

e.g. I have that Facebook Container, and I also have a Slack container I just put together in the usual way by opening my Slack session (it's for the main social group I hang out with, during the pandemic) inside a Container with a pink theme and icon.

Suppose three friends send me a funny Youtube video of kittens, one sends it on Slack, one on Facebook, one literally sends me a postcard with the URL on it.

In Facebook, it's inside the Facebook container. Since the Facebook Container has no idea who I am, Youtube presents adverts and of course there's no way to add the video to my "Fun kitten videos" list. But if I tell Youtube to open this now the tab is not Facebook, a no-referrer link opens with the URL and now in my default context which has Youtube Premium, so there are no adverts and I can add this to my lists. As far as Facebook is concerned I apparently just left. Unless Google tells them I watched that video they are none the wiser.

Slack is inside the Slack container. So again, no Youtube account, adverts. But if I open the Youtube page that's still inside the Slack container, so still no Youtube account. I need to explicitly get the URL and paste it into a not Slack tab to get my default context.

The link from the postcard obviously I get to choose which context to type it into the URL bar, although maybe the UX of typing random Youtube URLs in isn't great.

wouldn't they know exactly who you are with every request sent to any of their servers and any facebook page you load either by your facebook account, IP address, or by browser fingerprinting.

But in another very real sense they've got no idea who that is. It would suit them very well to be able to reliably tie it to other information (hence all the tracking pixels and so on) but the Container prevents that.

I mean, one of my Facebook friends is named say "Norman Le Plum". I'm very confident that isn't what it says on his birth certificate, and indeed when his friend request arrived I actually ignored it until I found someone out of band to tell me who "Norman" was, but in a sense Facebook know exactly who Norman is, he's a disembodied red skull who is still really into skateboarding and Steamed Hams.

What use that is,isn't clear, and presumably one day advertisers might conclude the answer is "No use whatsoever" and Facebook will go out of business. Meanwhile I read funny Steamed Hams variants, people complain about their jobs, and while I'd rather it didn't exist at all, if it must exist at least it's trapped in a little box where it can't taint everything else.

Now Google probably knows way too much about me, but that's quite a different problem.

Facebook devotes a huge amount of time and money to collecting data and using it to associate people to a real identity to the extent that even people who never signed up for an account at all have hidden profiles created for them by facebook which contain the intimate details of their life including what they buy at the grocery store.

As far as I can tell, a container won't protect your identity but it will limit the amount of information they have on your browsing history (unless your ISP decides to sell them that information or they obtain some of it from a 3rd party data broker)

But yes, in a Foo container, all the various Google things (Docs, GMail, their Cloud offering, Youtube...) are either not logged in at all or they're logged in from some Foo context.

thanks for the sticky windows tip

Last I checked, I'd have to enumerate every Google domain and subdomain, which just seemed like too much work. But if others have already done this, itd be easy to just use theirs.

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

You can use this. It's a fork of Facebook Container, but for Google.

This one is a fork for Amazon https://github.com/krober/contain-amazon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contain-amazo...

Twitter: https://github.com/v1shwa/contain-twitter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-conta...

There's a few more too

AFAICT private Firefox windows are also part of the same container so you don’t get true separation (can’t open multiple Firefox private windows and log into different google accounts — does that work in Safari?)

[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/author/olivia-scholes