DNS encrypted
    "Total Cookie Protection"
    uBlock Origin
    multi-account containers

    built-in screen capture
    *various other extensions, such as Copy All Tab URLs

Bravo Mozilla!

I still don't like the fact that it has sponsored links then - that is what rubs me the wrong way.

Ah, that explains the telemetry and experiemnts that are enabled by default without explicit user consent.

Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.

The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.

edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.

I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.

On Android, look at Mull until Libre Wolf is available there.

On iOS, lol, you get Safari or skinned Safari due to Apple's app store rules.

And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.

My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.

I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.

I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.

NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]

ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]

---

For comparison

Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]

ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]

---

I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)

[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu

[2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/?s=audit

[3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits/

[4] https://protonvpn.com/blog/?s=audit

The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.

If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).

If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.

I think the reason why the method you mention isn't commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set up and hard to verify.

I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the OS.

Ironically (I hope?), Mullvad is by far the one I see pushed the most.

https://mullvad.net/en/

I frequently have DNS issues with Mullvad, and also speeds are lower. Proton is also more expensive though...

Also, there's a long outstanding issue (on their Github [1] ) which they have confirmed) that the Mullvad app causes iCloud services to stop syncing (bookmarks, Files, etc.). That's a showstopper if you use Apple devices...

[1] https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/2401

...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something, somewhere, I can just edit.

You can click on "Manage Containers", choose a container and then remove the site with "Manage Site List".

Also, the UI is... not great. For example you cannot add new urls here. Some websites forward you to some other external url through another domain for example. there is no way to add these custom domains. So annoying. There yet another extension to solve that problem, but... it doesn't support Firefox 'sync'.

Can this not (at least partly) solved by copying over the correct files in combination with settings sync?

Given all the ways there are to fingerprint browsers these days, this belief is likely to be overly optimistic.

EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances:

firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u

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

You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3).

I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile.

On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.

The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:

* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.

* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)

Anything for that?

If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that launches a profile other than the one you've selected as the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are here:

https://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile

This is not necessary to use the profile feature, but some people prefer to launch profiles from shortcuts instead of a menu.

Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.

I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?

Whole process takes a couple years or so.

Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to simplify management of containers, plus my password manager.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/

Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue.

I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on Firefox.

All I can find is:

We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

So they will eventually remove it sooner than later.

If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.

They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing.

In no particular order ...

- You can't clear history for a particular container space [1]

- Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container

- No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside of each individual tab

No, I am not interested in solving these basic, first-order use-cases with some rando extension from joey75 @ gitlabusercontent.downloads.tv.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1170863

I suspect it would be fairly straightforward to make an extension that set a per-window default container, but I agree that it should be built in functionality. (Whether that default should override site-specific container rules, I'm not sure... I kind of want both options, but I guess that's where it starts getting complex.)

I'm annoyed by the lack of integration between container and history. I never really want to clear history for a non-private window, but I do want to be able to restrict what I see by container when it makes sense and not restrict when it doesn't. My main grievance: searching for open tabs (either by prefixing the location bar entry with "% " or by choosing the Open Tabs option from the dropdown that appears when you start entering something) should match across all tabs, at least in the context of a freshly-opened new tab.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858

> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container

True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.

I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.

Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox we can still tweak some of it.