Sidebery[0] and Tree Style Tab[1] are excellent reasons to stay with Firefox (or any of its derivatives).

> Containers! This is one of the biggest reasons to stick with Firefox.

Too bad you still can't chose what add-ons that should run in a certain container. In that sense it is more limited than profiles in Firefox (or Chrome). Speaking of containers, Temporary Containers[2] is a cool add-on too. Not recommended[3] though...

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

[3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

> Not recommended

The "recommended extensions" vetting process is another excellent reason to stick with Firefox.

>Recommended extensions differ from other extensions that are regularly reviewed by Firefox staff in that they are curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience. Firefox staff thoroughly evaluate each extension before it receives Recommended status.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

The profiles situation is probably the biggest papercut for me with Firefox.

I fix it with the extension and then installing the extra software, but it really shouldn't be necessary.

Containers are excellent, but not the same. I would like my work Bitwarden separate from my personal Bitwarden.

> Too bad you still can't chose what add-ons that should run in a certain container.

Using the same settings, including extensions, is why I use containers.

Creating several containers is something that I can do in under a minute. If I decided to add an extension, it applies to all containers. Creating a single profile takes several minutes. Maintenance is also a concern, since the configuration of those profiles will diverge unless I am conscientious about updating them all at the same time.

Profiles and containers serve different purposes and can be used in parallel. The main problem with Firefox lays in the difficulty in accessing profiles.

>Sidebery[0] and Tree Style Tab[1] are excellent reasons to stay with Firefox (or any of its derivatives).

I'm using Sideberry (moved from TST) on FF and i think it's good but Edge has great native vertical tabs implementation which doesn't require any "advanced" configuration to make it work.

Yeah, even though I use TST on Firefox, the native vertical tab feature on Edge feels snappier and lighter to use probably because it's a native feature. Even if it lacks tree style tabs, Edge did a nice job with its vertical tabs and tab groups.

Why Sideberry over TST?

Containers, 'panels', (IMO) looks better.

Can I ask how you use Sidebery and Tree Style Tab? I found that they both create a panel on the left side of screen and will stay there forever, which reduces the space for web content. The left panel also makes my small laptop screen look even smaller.

Sidebery and Tree Style Tabs make sense when used on a display with decent screen real estate when the viewport width is significantly higher than viewport height. I usually have more than 250 tabs open at a time which would be impossible to navigate without these vertical tree tab extensions.

It's supposed to replace the tab bar. Unfortunately there's no API to do that and you have to rely on a custom userChrome.css.

Re loss of screen space: yes. However the reasoning is that losing some horizontal space is not as bad as loosing vertical space.

To be fair, modern web design often maxes out at 1920p of screen width, often even narrower. You just lose whitespace.

Though it depends on how you use your screen: if you like to tile windows horizontally, it takes more of your space. Tree Style Tab has a keyboard shortcut, F1 by default, to toggle its sidebar panel, and when I’m tiling side-by-side I often use it to close the tab bar for the moment. I’ve been surprised just how many pages are at least a little broken at 618px wide (what I get for two windows side-by-side, with the sidebar open)—I expected it to be rare, but while it’s not the norm, it’s hardly rare.

You can toggle the pane with F1.

I've tried Sideberry and TST, but tend to prefer Simple Tab Groups[0] to either of them. The advantage is that STG reduces the clutter of tabs on the top-pane and of course allows one to group them and move them about. Sure, Sideberry allows you to group them and it shows the grouping in the side-pane, but all the tabs still show up on the top-pane.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

You can hide the top tab bar for TST with an edit to userChrome.css

Add this:

#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

And I believe this is necessary: about:config toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets => false

Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't been made more seamless yet but it is what I always do.

Temporary Containers is the best extension for Firefox.

Every new tab is its own separate container. I configured it so Ctrl + clicking a link will open a tab in the same container, should I need this for "traditional browsing" where I want to share a session/cookies.

Security by isolation - by default.

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

PS: There's also a neat one called Proxy Containers to assign separate containers to a different proxy.

There's no need for this anymore security-wise thanks to First-Party Isolation AKA Total Cookie Protection. Every domain is totally separated.

I couldn't enumerate for you all the things isolated to a container; I am no expert. However, I believe first-party isolation only concerns itself with cookies.

IIRC cache is also isolated, I can't seem to find the blog post now, but as I remember mozilla essentially said that temporary containers are replaced by their site isolation.

So FPI would cover the common need, to completely isolate 1 site from another. Containers would still be applicable if you wanted to maintain separate sessions to the same site. Like viewing a site without logging in, and in another tab doing so.

I've found this good for webdev of course ~

Yep! I use containers for that, quite handy.

> assign separate containers to a different proxy

what VPN provider can you use with this extension?

mozilla vpn

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/mozilla-vpn/multi-accou...

which is a rebranded mullvad. mullvad is pretty cool (doesn't require any private info for creating an account or paying, and they recently disabled recurring payments so they don't need to store credit card info, even though this has a financial hit to the company https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...)

I am using it with my own wireguard instance.

how are you binding only specific containers to wireguard?

I think I should have said "my own proxy" rather than wireguard. I just happen to access it via wireguard. Though I did want to point out that any vpn proxy would work.

The Multi Account Containers extension has an Advanced proxy settings at the bottom when you go in to Manager Containers. I have a go based socks proxy running on docker somewhere. I enter the details for that there. Syntax is socks://ip:port .

I have two socks implementations installed. I A/B test them sometimes but they seem to be basically equivalent in terms of performance.

https://github.com/net-byte/socks5-server

https://github.com/ocassio/go-socks5-proxy (old but works fine)

Note: If you're using a chromium based browser you can use the excellent SwitchyOmega plugin to do this much easier and with more functionality. No containers of course.

If you want to assign proxy rules without using containers, the Proxy SwitchyOmega add-on is also available for Firefox:

- Proxy SwitchyOmega: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switchyomega/

- Source: https://github.com/FelisCatus/SwitchyOmega

Another option is the FoxyProxy add-on:

- FoxyProxy Standard: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-sta...

- Source: https://github.com/foxyproxy/firefox-extension

Thanks. I didn't know switchy was available for Firefox too. That's great. It must not have come up in my searches. Probably because of its date.

I am aware of foxyproxy. It works OK. I was using it until the containers gained proxy support.

4. Picture-in-picture

I am on a laptop so I don't have an extra screen to put video on, but every now and then I will have something playing in the background. It's nice to be able to have a small view of it in the corner while working.

This is a big one I don't see mentioned often. Chrome requires a separate extension for PiP, it doesn't support multiple PiP windows, you can't freely resize them, there's less controls on the pop-up, etc.

I'm confused. I use this feature almost everyday on Chromium and never had to use an extension for it. You can move and resize the PIP window.

4. Help dilute the Chromium monopoly

5. Helping the poor CEO earning a bit more, despite her failing management

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

Surely the same argument wouldn't apply to Chrome which is owned by a monopolist megacorp.

At least they don't pretend to be some champions of internet freedom or something.

So it makes them better?

Agreed, containers are great. I love them and wish they were a standard feature across browsers. Still some room for improvement though. It would be nice if the containers acted like an entirely different instance of a browser, with different settings, history, extensions, etc. With the current design it's still possible to accidently leaked details across containers by visiting something in the wrong one if you havent set up exclusive browsing for a particular site, and history is shared across containers. Would be nice to be able to export container settings as well as a lot of work can go into setting them up.

You get this functionality by using Firefox profiles. It's a separate browser instance with completely separated history, extension, ...

It doesn't work like containers though, you can't open a new tab in a new profile.

If you use Firefox profiles regularly, you might enjoy the Profile Switcher for Firefox add-on, which provides a Chrome-like interface for loading and managing profiles in Firefox:

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

- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

Please access this link and generate interest around Firefox natively implementing the same UI/UX for Profiles as Chrome has right now:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/shortcut-for-different-...

Also there's this bug report:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542189

Hopefully someone will listen to feedback, this time...

Considering Thunderbird still doesn't support a multi-line message list after 19 years[1], if you need that feature I suggest using the addon linked earlier because Mozilla does not move quickly.

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

I've stated this so many times for decades now. Profile support is something that I would literally pay towards funding support but there isnt a good way of setting up a bounty which I'll pay £100 into each month until the bounty is large enough to motivate someone to do it.

I have 10 different containers set up - profiles are too clunky for this.

Never used uMatrix but looks like it's a content blocker like uBO. any reason for using both instead of just uBO?

My understanding is that uMatrix is a bit different. By default, it will block just about all third-party requests. It can sometimes be a pain to manage, in particular for sites with many redirects and an absurd number of domains. I'm thinking Azure/Office365.

It's not a full replacement for uBO either because it won't attempt to do anything fancy to block ads specifically.

However, uMatrix is no longer maintained. Its GitHub page [0] says the project has been archived. I'm still using it, don't know whether there are any risks in doing so.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

Simple and straightforward blocking/permitting of cookies, css, images, media, scripts, xhr, frames, and others per domain.

You can theoretically do the same thing with uBo, but it’s far more involved and not a thing you want to do all the time.

Not everyone will like it, but uMatrix comes with more fine-grained control, and the defaults are set to block all third-party and cross-site loads, including static content hosted on other domains. So a lot of sites will break by default, and you've to go enable anything that you actually want. uBlock on the other hand will only block the (list) filters you've enabled.

uBlock Origin has an advanced mode (Dynamic filtering) that allows most of the config uMatrix allowed.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering

I'm pretty comfortable with uMatrix and for whatever reason the uBlock filtering UX just completely flummoxes me.

I don't recommend using dynamic filters because they completely override any matching static filters. Makes the point of filter lists useless, if uBo had a way to set dynamic filters to a lower priority than static they might actually be useful. At the moment the only way I found to replicate uMatrix was to use static filters to block by default on a per domain basis and whitelist domains per request type. It is a lot more work so I only do so for sites with user generated content (e.g. hn or reddit) that have links to who knows where that you might want to prevent from loading.

  *$strict3p,~css,~image,~script,domain= \
    stackexchange.com| \
    stackoverflow.com| \
    superuser.com
  *$strict3p,css,image,domain=stackexchange.com|stackoverflow.com|superuser.com,denyallow=cdn.sstatic.net
  *$strict3p,script,domain=stackexchange.com|stackoverflow.com|superuser.com,denyallow= \
    cdn.sstatic.net| \
    ajax.googleapis.com

Still not everything, and way harder to use.

If you're proficient with using Medium or Hard mode with uBlock Origin, then no. It's basically just a different UI.

uMatrix has not been in Development for a long time (Developer did not have the time and decided to focus on uBlock Origin.)

uMatrix is deprecated, you can get most of its features via uBO: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering

That may be true but uMatrix' UX is unmatched - the matrix UI allows for granular control while achieving the same in uBO is significantly harder.

Unfortunately the nuTensor fork is also now inactive & archived.

I think this was because gorhill decided to release a uMatrix fix. uMatrix is not getting development, but is also essentially "done".

Oh nice, I didn't notice that.

I certainly don't have a problem with it being 'done', I just had 'move to nuTensor' on my mental to-do list just for the potential security/API fixes, ensuring it remains available etc.

X. Just to keep the browser competition alive.

We can't let google win, even if they kind-of have already. It's important to have a choice

4. On Android it has support for plugins. I have been using Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin for years without any issues.

I have a simpler method, which is to simply have different profiles open via command line shortcut.

One per monitor with different extensions and security setting, which I use for different accounts.

why uBlock and uMatrix both? Aren't they mutually exclusive?

4. about:config