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Contextual Identities on the Web

blog.mozilla.org

101–110 of 140 posts

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#102
I'm not sure about Firefox's implementation of it, but throughout computing I'm seeing more and more need for this kind of thing, not to mention something softer than full user-account switching for handing a device between family members or teammates. As everything gets more personalized and more tightly bound to the user by learning their habits and typing and voice and all that, and simultaneously in a social networking context we broadcast stuff about ourselves incidentally (like Youtube learning your viewing preferences and likes) that the ability to switch context neatly and quickly is becoming more important.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#104
post #88

I am always confused by the lack of user customization in features like this. Why am I limited to four containers? Why can't I rename them? Four is not enough (personally, though I imagine it would be for most people) and remembering which identity is under "Work" and which is under "Shopping" is just an annoyance when none of my identities would be for "Work" or "Shopping". It would be faster and less annoying to si…

This is a complex feature to implement and they "don't have all the answers...yet, but hope to start uncovering some of them with user research and feedback." If customization is important to you, you can let them know: "We hope to gather feedback on this basic experience to see how we can iterate on the design to make it more convenient, elegant, and usable for our users. Try it out and share your feedback by filling out this quick form or writing to containers@mozilla.com."

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#105
post #25
post #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…

Did you try the "Self destructing cookies"[1] extension for Firefox? It is close to your "forgets cookies" requirement. IIRC it has per domain settings and allows you to configure the cookies to self destruct after closing the tab, the browser or never. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

I used Cookie Block for a long time, though it seems I did some upgrade recently and lost it....

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-block/

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#106
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.

Nightly builds do include extra debugging instrumentation which makes them slower than released versions.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#107
post #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…

I prototyped this feature last year as an intern at Mozilla. I think the engineering done for containers can be exposed in a lot of cool ways to the user. I'd love for you to send in your ideas on the comment form [1]. One of the features we considered last summer was "site specific containers" [2], which would support your facebook example.

[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1oQN14TUnqj-MDErp8MKxH_v7Ytt... [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#109

Vote-brigading and trolling have never been so easy! All sarcasm aside, it is a great feature.

Agreed.

I still think that better support for contextual identities would be a net-positive across the board for the web, but I have to say that this little stunt gave me a good chuckle. Bravo!

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#110
post #70
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…

I agree that Firefox profile management is not user-friendly at all. I have an advice for you though, you don't need to open Firefox from a terminal if you want to be able to choose your profile at start-up. «all» you have to do is go to ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.ini and change it with: ``` [General] StartWithLastProfile=0 ``` Now Firefox will open a dialogue box at start-up asking you for the profile you want to us…

Alternately,

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

    -P "" Starts with a given profile name (profile name is case sensitive).      
    -no-remote          Enables running multiple instances of the application with different profiles; [1] used with -P 

    #!/bin/bash
    case "$1" in
	personal | work | banking | shopping)
	    firefox -no-remote -P "$1" ;;
	*) echo "unknown arg: $1"; return 1; ;;
    esac
and either rename profile directories, or the case statement labels, and optionally associate calls to the script with icons/widgets. [code not tested, use at own risk, ymmv, etc.]
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