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Contextual Identities on the Web

blog.mozilla.org

11–20 of 140 posts

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#12
Firefox's clumsy profile support is the one thing that makes me keep switching back to chrome. I really prefer firefox sync to chrome's implementation, and some of firefox's tab organization tools are way better than chrome's. But I use many of the same webapps in my personal life as I do in my work life, and being able to run two profiles simultaneously, and start them up without having to launch firefox from the terminal every time, was difficult.

What they've implemented seems to be better than chrome's profiles, in that it's easier to create a new profile for a specific context (so I don't have to sort things into a "work" bucket and a "personal" bucket.) It will be interesting to see how the contexts interact with plugins.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#13
This seems very useful for it's intended use-case. At first glance I would like to note however that advertisers (and other parties) will probably still be able to track you across these "containers", due to not isolating HSTS-flags and similar features.

I also wonder whether a seperate banking container makes a lot of sense when doing online payments, as in my country we get redirected to our bank to do payments. This might create confusion among non tech-savy users ("but this should be in my banking-container, I'll just switch. Why does the webshop give an error upon returning now?").

Overall a really cool feature though and one that might persuade me to give Firefox a try as daily driver again.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#15
post #3

That looks neat. And if it were possible to cheaply create and delete contextual identities on the fly it would even fix an issue I had today: the difficulty of multiple separate private browsing sessions in the same browser.

Agreed. Easy creation and management of additional contextual identities, even ephemeral ones that exist only for that particular browser session, would be terrific.

In addition, I'd like the ability to fine tune which items are isolated versus shared. I think in many cases, but not all, I'd like to shift saved passwords and form data into the identity contexts and away from the shared context. Not having to manually manage credentials when using multiple distinct sessions of a single web service would be nice.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#17
If we can get Tor Browser's first party origin feature in as well, this will be fantastic! I would love to have the ability to type www.facebook.com and get a context that isn't linked to the rest of my tabs.

I also want ephemeral containers so I could open a tab that forgets its cookies when I'm done. Think private browsing but without forgetting my history, requiring a new window, or being limited to one context at a time.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#18
post #3

That looks neat. And if it were possible to cheaply create and delete contextual identities on the fly it would even fix an issue I had today: the difficulty of multiple separate private browsing sessions in the same browser.

Firefox is as irrelevant as Best Buy.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#20
This looks really promising. The identity problem in browsers is something I tried to solve by customising the look of different Firefox instances opened with different profiles[1] (one for personal use, one for work etc). But having this functionality built in is definitely preferable.

[1] https://github.com/jamesturner/firefox-profile-indicator

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