Contextual Identities on the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#91

Post by grimgrin » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

fps wrote: post #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 te…

Doesn't it also just genuinely feel more sluggish to you? Just installed Nightly to test this feature out, and then took another minute to use the developer tools to do some debugging, and the whole experience felt less smooth. Maybe only microseconds of a difference in and the , but noticeable nonetheless.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#92

Post by nixpulvis » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

I literally just read the paper [1] a few days ago, pretty interesting. It lays out a lot of work and thought to be done.

[1] http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/W2SP/2013/papers/s1p2.pdf

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#93

Post by olalonde » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

enscr wrote: post #84

Is it like the Chrome "People" (or profiles or user) feature ? Suggesting that "user won’t need to use multiple browsers" seems like a problem that didn't exist if you used chrome.

One notable difference is that those identities are tied to tabs instead of windows. Chrome doesn't let you mix tabs from different "profiles" within the same browser window.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#94

Post by rcthompson » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

ronjouch wrote: post #38

@HN @dang why the post de-rename? When submitting, I intentionally editorialized the title from something unclear out of mozilla's blog context ( "Contextual Identities on the Web" ) to a more explicit title that speaks by itself ( "Firefox 50 nightly new feature: Contextual Identities" ). Isn't this considered valuable here?

Note that the domain of the link is displayed next to the title, and helps to provide context in many cases, including this one.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#95

Post by Sylos » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

milesokeefe wrote: post #55

callahad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Chrome user sessions don't share history, saved passwords, bookmarks, or add-ons. Firefox Contextual Identities do.

There are pros and cons to that though. It can be useful to have extensions unique to each profile.

Firefox has had those kind of profiles for a long time, they just aren't the most accessible thing in the world. But yeah, you can access them from about:profiles or also via the command-line with "firefox -P". If you want to use it more extensively, there's also extensions available for easy switching, like for example Profilist. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#96

Post by danbruc » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

Supported at least since IE 8 (2009) [1], not sure how multiple instances behaved before.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2009/05/06/session-cooki...

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#97

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

enscr wrote: post #84

Is it like the Chrome "People" (or profiles or user) feature ? Suggesting that "user won’t need to use multiple browsers" seems like a problem that didn't exist if you used chrome.

No, your history, bookmarks, and add-ons will be shared among all the Containers.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#98

Post by TheDong » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: 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.

It's quite easy in firefox. Just have two firefox shortcuts, one of "firefox -P default" which you use normally (default profile) and one with "firefox --no-remote -P" which, on launch, will give you a dialogue to select or create a named profile. In addition, the "--no-remote" bit means you can run any number of firefox instances side-by-side with no issue.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#99

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #34

So this is like profiles but tab-level instead of window level?

Profiles separate your history, bookmarks, and add-ons. This shares all of those things between Containers.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#100

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jun 16, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #46

If they're going to use per-tab containers, doesn't it make sense to have per-tab sandboxing as well, to ensure there's no data leakage?

They just barely separated the chrome process from the rendering process. All tab content is rendered in the same process for now. Eventually they will separate it further but it's not done yet.