These extensions are killer, and are the primary reason I use Firefox. No other browsers have similar functionality at all that I've found.

For me, it's the best setup I've found in terms of cookie/session management. By default, I do want every new tab I open to come with a clean slate of no cookies, local storage, SQLite, or whatever other storage/tracking mechanisms are invented. If I need to open up a Google service, I simply open a new tab in my Google container. Combined with a good password manager to quickly login to lower security accounts, it is a marginal increase in work managing sessions, with the benefit of not tracking all your cookies and history around everywhere you go. The features aren't perfect since it's not a workflow optimized for consumer simplicity, but it works for me.

Yes, also you can have FF drop cookies from all sites but a few at the end of the session. I use this on my other computers and for nontechnical friends.

Its buggy https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767271

does anyone know why chrome can't do containers, this is also why i use firefox

It would seem its again the interest of one of the biggest contributors to the open source code base of chromium...

For discussion about it.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/IZ...

In response to asking about supporting multiple profiles between different tabs.

>Extraordinarily difficult. I would expect person-years of effort for this, as the link between profile and window is deeply ingrained throughout the code.

Chrome doesn't support containers because it would take a big investment that no one is currently willing to make. Google doesn't want to spend millions of dollars and deprioritize more important work for a niche feature that not that many people benefit from.

I am doubtful about the person-years of effort. It's an indirection.

Or the code is specially laid out that way over the years to make this a person-years effort.

Come on, no software project is ran with that level or "what if" foresight.

I'll go with incompetence over conspiracy.

No "what-if" is needed to pull of that kind of thing. As an advertisement company, just never prioritize this separation, and do not discourage this "integration" in PRs.

You're done. Build while fresh.

P.S.: Microsoft is actively rigging its software, lastly VS-Code just for these things, but it's another can of worms I have no desire to open again.

In this writeup [1] about adding Rust to Chromium there is a note on the architecture shared state in the architure which may explain the difficulty

"... Chrome is built on foundational but really wide C++ APIs, such as the //content/public layer. We examined what it would mean for us to build Rust components against these types of APIs. At a high level what we found was that because C++ and Rust play by different rules, things can go sideways very easily.

For example, Rust guarantees temporal memory safety with static analysis that relies on two inputs: lifetimes (inferred or explicitly written) and exclusive mutability. The latter is incompatible with how the majority of Chromium’s C++ is written. We hold redundant mutable pointers throughout the system, and pointers that provide multiple paths to reach mutable pointers. ..."

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2023/01/supporting-use-of-ru...

An expert in a field should be able to estimate with reasonable accuracy what kind of effort a certain activity requires. And to be honest "person-years" doesn't look that much at all for a feature that's so useful (but only to the user). 10 people working for a couple of months full time already qualifies.

It is a lie when we know ghost browsers essentially do the same. I think it is just not in the best interest of Google because it might hurt their bottom line i.e. ads.

You can open a new window for a separate session, just not a new tab.

It does have profiles, which can be used in the same way. Haven't used it in a while, I think the limitation is that you can't use a different profile per tab; you need a whole new window

FF has that profile system too.

The key insight for me was that persistence should be opt-in—when I want a website to remember me, I take action to express that—the opposite of the current norm.

I sometimes wonder whether Google was strategically preempting this paradigm when they mainstreamed ephemeral sessions under the framing of sneaky mode.

The vast majority of people find persistent sessions convenient.

If you don't want cookies, you can turn them off for all sites (with exceptions) or for some sites.

rejecting cookies ≠ giving them a short lifetime

Cookies aren’t inherently bad. If a second party asks me to hold on to something while I’m actively engaged with it, that’s typically fine. At the end of the day, though, I’m deciding what to take home.

> I do want every new tab I open to come with a clean slate

I'd like that too, how can you do that?

I've been using Firefox containers for a while. When I open a new tab it opens in the default non-container which carries it's own storage cesspit.

You need to use Temporary Container's shortcut to open the tab, I think extensions cannot override builtin ones.. (And you need Temporary Containers in the first place: that's the bit that creates fresh new containers.)

For me the shortcut is alt C.

The answer is using Temporary Contains with "Automatic Mode" enabled in the preferences.

I just opened a new tab normally, with no shortcut, and it automatically created a fresh temp container "tmp2". I logged into HN and replied to this comment. I will close the tab now, and in 5 minutes, due to another Temp Containers setting, everything in the temp container will be wiped.

The whole silly "No Container" business goes away entirely.

See https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers/wiki/Autom...

I agree. Google and Firefox have a high number and quality of plugins, but Google Chrome has a larger market for plugins and it is easier to find plugins for specific features. However, Firefox supports plugins in the WebExtensions format, which is compatible with Google Chrome, but also supports other formats such as XUL and XPCOM that give developers more control

Temporary containers are the final solution to cookie based tracking, just like how forwarding services like Simplelogin (not affiliated) is the final solution to email spam. They have very similar underlying principles: reduce exposure by reducing the power you grant and starting afresh every time to avoid information leakage. With temporary containers, only whitelisted sites can have persistent storage and they are isolated by containers. All other sites can have cookies only within the same session, after which temporary container cookies get cleared. Combined with general content and script blocking solutions like uBlock Origin and resistFingerprinting, we can have reasonably good privacy.. for now at least, until the trackers catch up.

For me the solution is Cookie AutoDelete extension. It allows cookies but silently deletes them (and optionally other storage) after specified amount of time (5 hours for me). So the sites don't break and I don't have to close browser to clear cookies.

Temporary containers are great but sometimes there are problems with logins or payments where a sote can't redirect back to where it has to. This leads me to temporarily turn off temporary containers which kind of defeats the whole point.

Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies.

They note:

> If you are a Multi-Account Containers user who has already assigned Facebook to a Container, this extension will not work

(along with workarounds)

I was wondering about it, why the hell they develop 2 different container extensions ?

Power users are fickle and they too are, I suspect, power users of Firefox too.

The simpler extension for people only concerned by Facebook's tracking.

There is the internal container system in Firefox, and you need an extension to use it. At my work, we use this functionality to login into multiple accounts at once, for the same site.

you actually don't need an extension. You can enable container from about:config.

After reading about it repeatedly here, I finally tried Multi Account Containers and I'm disappointed. I want to press a button and get site X open in container Y. But as it is, after searching for the container, you then have to search for the website you want to open in it separately. It makes having lots of containers hard, plus there's the risk of accidentally opening sites in your "main container", etc. You have to do twice the work for every new site, maintaining bookmarks and containers.

There's a function to always open a site in a container, but this obviously falls over if you have multiple accounts (aws, gmail, etc), plus the UI is poorly communicated.

There are requests to make it so you can associate a container with a bookmark, for instance, but apparently Moz prevented Moz from doing this via browser apis, and have been powerless to do anything about it for years.

It could have been awesome.

Felt the same exact way. I’ve tried multiple times to give Firefox containers a try, but the UX is just horribly designed. So much so that I don’t think they even care about it as a feature. It feels more like a publicity stunt. If a browser could deliver a usable container experience, I would instantly switch to it.

Oh really? I find them excellent. I don't know how you're trying to use them - but I have a "work" window, which opens new containers in the "work" container (which has all my work accounts). It's a great way to keep accounts separate and it's one of my favorite parts of Firefox.

The last time I tried, which was a while back, two things that bothered me:

- there was no way to make CMD/CTRL+T open a new tab in the same container context as the one you were currently in. To me, this seems like an obvious UX flaw. If you’re browsing in a container, the actions you’re doing should keep you in that container unless you consciously want to switch.

- building on that, there was no option to right click and open a link in a different container. These two features would make container use feel far more natural, and likely make adoption much easier.

If those two features have been implemented, I will give Firefox and containers another go. If not, then I’d like to know what your workflow is and why it is a more natural UX.

Bonus points: make the first option configurable. Extra bonus points, for the second feature, have a right click option to open in a new container.

Edit: since I know I bookmarked it, I went and dug up the bug report for that first feature:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1245262

It’s 7 years old and still open. A quick glance shows that discussion is still ongoing today, so I assume it isn’t possible. Given how long it has been actively discussed, I don’t think it would be far fetched to say that my expected use case is not odd.

I use Alt+F+B+Down arrow to browse my containers when opening a new tab. For the most frequent ones, I use Ctrl+Maj+1/2/3/4, etc., I know which ones they are.

Those shortcuts are by default, I haven't had to tweak anything, and although they're not standard browser shortcuts, I prefer that option to a remapping of standards.

> - there was no way to make CMD/CTRL+T open a new tab in the same container context as the one you were currently in. To me, this seems like an obvious UX flaw. If you’re browsing in a container, the actions you’re doing should keep you in that container unless you consciously want to switch.

There's still no quick, default shortcut for this, but you can use this add-on to give you that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/easy-containe...

FWIW, the main add-on (Multi Account Containers) lets you do Cmd + Shift + {number} to open a new tab in a specific container -- but I admit that's still some cognitive overhead compared to just doing something like Cmd + Opt + T to open a tab in the same container as your current tab.

> - building on that, there was no option to right click and open a link in a different container.

This is absolutely in the main add-on now, and I use it regularly!

My flow is window-centric - there's a "new container tab" option that will give you a tab in the selected container. Any new tab opened while looking at that tab will be in the same container. That's how I maintain my "work window" - but the specific feature you want (which seems sensible) isn't possible as far as I know.

As others have said, you can right click -> open in container!

Worth noting that Chrome has multiple profile support too, so you can keep work separate if you like. I don't think it's quite as powerful as Firefox containers though.

Folks, I realize it must be frustrating that it doesn't fit your use cases, and I agree the "multiple accounts for the same site" use case isn't well covered, but that they're "unusable" is simply not true. I for one (but apparently also many others) have been very happily using them as they are. For most of the sites I use them for I have exactly one account and would like to have zero.

Essentially, if I make a container for you're website, you've made it to my personal shit list. :)

> Essentially, if I make a container for you're website, you've made it to my personal shit list. :)

Ha, I'm the other way around: all websites go into temporary containers, and if I make a container for your website, it's a privilege that I'm allowing you to remember me.

Agreed, it's just a bit too clunky to be practical. In the end I have two containers I actually use, but only for special purposes. One is when I have to log in to facebook and one is for searching with a different language set. Neither of which happens more than once a month at most.

So yeah, everything else happens in the main browser as before.

Well, if you are able to pre-configure “site X” and “container Y” then this plugin may help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dashbox/

It implements a batch URL open, rather than ad-hoc link open

Use Containerize for that.

You can create rules around which URIs open in what containers, even with regex.

Just out of curiosity, what do you use instead?

Anyway some tips and tricks from a long time user. First, you can use always open this site in container x. Which is useful for some sites. Then, I also used pinned tabs with various gmail accounts in different containers.

And you can right click on links, bookmarks, and tabs to (re)open in a particular container. I use containers a lot to test our app with various different users in different containers. I also use this with google drive to manage drives for various accounts. Also if you click on links in a particular container they open in the same container. So, for example if I have an online meeting in my company container, the video call opens in the same container.

The UX could be improved and it would indeed be nice to tie individual bookmarks to containers. I've also been looking for this very obvious feature that somehow is the hardest thing ever in Firefox. But it still beats what other browsers offer here, which is mostly nothing. Chrome has account profiles but it is a bit awkward to use and you have to work with different windows. This is much more powerful. You could do the same with Firefox by starting it with different user profiles but it's a bit painful to set that up. Account containers are much easier.

have you tried right click > open in container > choose container?

or right click on the tab > reopen in container > choose container

Another thing you can do, hold left click on the new tab button. You will get a drop-down where you can chose which container to open the tab in.

I disagree. I think the current system works great.

When the "always open" setting conflicts with a current container, you get a prompt. If you want to open a specific container, long press the create tab button to get a selection of containers so you can browse to the website manually.

Using multiple accounts works great for me. Clicking on links will open in the same container, opening the website in a specific container is easy, I don't see the blocker here.

I don't know how many containers you intend on using but I don't find the feature problematic at all. Maybe the Tree Style Tabs integration is fixing a problem I don't know about, but it's working great for me.

Is there something similar for mobile?

I love these two, but I actually have a third, even more paranoid option for you to ponder: LibreWolf with default settings.

It has total cookie protection (meaning tabs don't co-mingle) and u-block origin is on by default. Finally, history is wiped on browser close. This, IMO, is on par with the aforementioned plug ins, but is more "uniform" in the sense that every librewolf install is identical.

Additionally, librewolf has WAY less telemetry out of the box than Firefox, which is always nice.

Truth is the first time I check this, but theoretically it was also deployed by default to Firefox some months ago (and I see it activated in my Nightly install).

Have any of you seen/noticed a difference when TCP is enabled? I wasn't paying attention when it was deployed.

The history (and other stuff) wiping is something I'm thinking about doing, but just for "health". I tend to accumulate open tabs to review later... that I never review. I started doing it in my cell phone, opening all links by default in private/expendable tabs. If the apps closes, they're gone. If the link is interesting, I'll do the effort of manually saving it somewhere.

You're right, TCP is enabled by default for regular Firefox too, as can be seen in the callout in the "Standard" entry here: https://assets-prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...

Note that Temporary containers is NOT by Mozilla.

Just saying...