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Contextual Identities on the Web

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Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#131

Post by JadeNB »

dmckeon wrote: post #110
stymaar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

However, stymaar (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11916985 )'s suggestion seemed to be specifically about avoiding the command line:

> 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.

I don't know, on Mac or Windows, how (although it would be nice) to wrap your script, or any other command-line executable, as an app that takes its arguments as parameters specified on double-click.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#132

Post by eximius »

This is a huge step in the right direction.

However, my personal vision is taking this one step further with an 'identity management' daemon running on your computer or a hardware token which acts a cryptographic agent on behalf of your identities. So firefox, chrome, or whatever application could request a credential for some service and your daemon would pop up and ask you which identity's credentials to use or if you'd like to make a new one (U2F or some other system).

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#133

Post by Sylos »

grimgrin wrote: post #91
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.

Do you have extensions installed? Nightly has E10s default-enabled, and there's currently still pretty bad performance problems when using certain extensions with E10s.

Basically, extension developers can "shim" their add-ons, which, as far as I understand it, tells Firefox that it has to handle things which are affected by the extension in a single-threaded way, again. And because the world is a grim place, this doesn't just get you back to non-E10s performance, but is actually worse.

Eventually, add-on developers should properly port their extensions to E10s and then those performance problems will disappear, but at the moment they are still very frequent and when Mozilla rolls out E10s, they will also only default-enable it for users without extensions for this exact reason.

If you want to troubleshoot this, I would recommend looking at about:performance and www.arewee10syet.com. You should probably check how performance is in a new profile[0] first, though, just to make sure that you're not trying to replace extensions when it might be caused by something else.

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#134

Post by tomaskafka »

stormbrew wrote: post #41
amluto wrote: 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 really feel like the entire session model of the web needs reworking from the ground up. I honestly want most of the websites I use to act more like apps, with a dedicated space for that site and not spread out across N tabs or windows. And also containerized exactly like this describes. There are some browser extensions that to do this, but they're pretty clunky overall.

No no noooooo! Long press -> open in new tab is a major reason I use websites instead of mobile apps for most places I go!

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#135

Post by ronjouch »

rcthompson wrote: post #94
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.

I know, but in some cases like this one, I feel it's not enough.

Had I not been subscribed to Mozilla's RSS feed, I personally would have skipped a "Contextual Identities on the Web (mozilla.org)" post on HN, because the vagueness would have made me mentally flag it as not time-worthwhile.

Contrarily, adding a few non-likbaitish words providing context (here, mentioning we're talking about a new feature in Firefox testable in Nightly, which is what my rename did), it becomes much more precise, less arbitrarily discard-able, thus interesting for certain people, including me.

But again, I understand the main reason the guidelines proscribe the practice: because it's a slippery slope to linkbait and incorrect reformulations.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#136

Post by stormbrew »

tomaskafka wrote: post #134
stormbrew wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel like the entire session model of the web needs reworking from the ground up. I honestly want most of the websites I use to act more like apps, with a dedicated space for that site and not spread out across N tabs or windows. And also containerized exactly like this describes. There are some browser extensions that to do this, but they're pretty clunky overall.

No no noooooo! Long press -> open in new tab is a major reason I use websites instead of mobile apps for most places I go!

In what I want I don't really see that being different. Not everything is an app, but the things that aren't are things that I don't visit every time I sit at a computer.

Mostly I see it actually working a lot like android's url-based intents, where there are things recognized as "apps" and actions directed at urls within that scope go to that 'app' to decide what to do with it, and things outside it go to a more traditional browser environment.

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#137

Post by eliaspro »

This is like a match made in heaven for Activities in KDE Plasma.

http://cukic.co/2016/02/08/heavy-activities-setup/

Now if only Firefox AddOns/Extensions would be able to properly access DBus, this would allow for a so much better Linux integration (storing passwords through org.freedesktop.Secret, opening URLs in the appropriate container from KDE Plasma sessions instead of random switches to another activity where a Firefox window is found, global media playback states/control for web video/audio as org.mpris.MediaPlayer2, powermanagement inhibitors through org.freedesktop.login1, etc)

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#138

Post by amluto »

Buetol wrote: post #124
englehardt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] http…

Is it possible to implement this feature via the extension API ? Exposing the low-levels, like choosing the cookie jar or intercepting calls to the local storage, would sprawl some really good privacy-enhancing extensions. EDIT: Looks like there are already extensions doing that ! nice !

> EDIT: Looks like there are already extensions doing that ! nice !

Can you send a link?

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#139

Post by pritambaral »

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…

Maybe this add-on might help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profileswitch...

Re: Contextual Identities on the Web

#140

Post by Buetol »

amluto wrote: post #138
Buetol wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to implement this feature via the extension API ? Exposing the low-levels, like choosing the cookie jar or intercepting calls to the local storage, would sprawl some really good privacy-enhancing extensions. EDIT: Looks like there are already extensions doing that ! nice !

> EDIT: Looks like there are already extensions doing that ! nice ! Can you send a link?

On chrome it's "Tab Cookies": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-cookies/iahecg...

On firefox, "Self destructing cookies": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

You're welcome :)

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