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Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

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Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#101

Post by commoner »

cassepipe wrote: post #68
mech422 wrote: post #14

Don't forget, you can still use multiple profiles. I have multiple shortcuts setup, each starting FF with a different profile. Within a profile, I use containers to further partition things. edit: for instance, I have a 'banking' profile with containers for each bank, brokerage, etc. The profile is totally separate from my 'general browsing' profile, so nothing can be sniffed. And the containers allow me to partition…

I always wondered why there was no easier way to change profiles in firefox than about:profiles. I am not sure what your solution is though, would you mind going into details ? Thanks in advance

There is an easier way, if you are willing to install the Profile Switcher for Firefox extension and accompanying connector. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#102

Post by commoner »

anonymousab wrote: post #52
mech422 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use different profiles for that... basically, I have multiple Firefox shortcuts, each using a different profile. You can also use containers with the profile to segregate things even more.

I wish Firefox had better (chrome-level) support for containers. There's various small QoL things that add up to make them a much more usable feature. At the very least, exposing them via webextension APIs would let developers take care of it themselves.

While Firefox doesn't have WebExtension APIs for browser profiles, the Profile Switcher for Firefox extension uses a separately installed connector binary to add a profile switcher (similar to Chrome's) in Firefox. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28356472

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#103

Post by kbenson »

rmkrmk wrote: post #100
kbenson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used containers with container proxy for well over a year and it works great for segregating work traffic on my home system. I use a container for work traffic that is assigned to an SSH session to my work system that exposes a SOCKS proxy that I make sure is running. Eventually I moved work browsing to a different browser that I set to run through that proxy explicitly, but I still have the Firefox config set u…

If you are on a Mac, have a look at finicky to manage which URLs should open in a specific browser. https://github.com/johnste/finicky

I'm not, but just yesterday or the day before I was thinking maybe I'd write a simple application to take the URL and make decisions what to do with it afterwards based on whatever data I decide is relevant (time of day, domain, etc). If I had access to what the source application was that would be ideal, but I doubt Windows 10 supplies that.

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#104

Post by commoner »

davidgerard wrote: post #82

Containers are a killer feature for Firefox, like having adblocking that works on mobile (unlike on Chrome). Just need containers on the mobile version.

There's a petition on ideas@mozilla for implementing containers in the mobile version of Firefox, if you'd like to vote for it: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#105

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Nbox9 wrote: post #64
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing I would love to see for containers is some sort of VPN that lets you connect through a different server on a specific container Congrats, you just invented the Tor browser. Or at least a variant where you are happy to store history etc on your machine.

Does Tor have enough bandwidth for streaming now?

On the rare occasion that you can get Youtube (because of google's rate limits) or similar to open on Tor, it can easily stream HD videos.

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#106

Post by d4nyll »

I've been using Firefox Containers for over half a year now (I use it with the Temporary Containers[1] extension). For most parts, it's working great.

However, whenever I encounter pop-up sign-in pages, such as for older websites and some Firefox extensions, the resulting user session cannot be accessed by the original page or extension. This is even if I open the pop-up with the same container, or with the 'No container' option.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#107

Post by BlackLotus89 »

generalizations wrote: post #88
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better performance not necessarily, but you can set custom rules for containers. You can set the user agent and proxy settings on a container base which is nice

Firefox used to freeze up periodically when I used TST, and that went away when I switched. That's all I meant.

Yup went away from TST for the same reason.

Made a performance comparison a few weeks ago to compare sidebery with TST (I got a few thousand open tabs, spread over ~50 windows) and didn't get the perfomance penalty I used to.

Side note: some plugins "crashed" when testing TST, sidebery and tab stash at the same time. Sidebery seemed to be the most stable. (had at one time no adblock anymore so that's something)

Side note 2: I really like some things about sidebery for instance the grouping of tabs and the possibility to see your bookmarks. TST needs to be extended through plugins for this, but some functionality is really only available in certain plugins.

Side note 3: The tab handling of sidebery and TST feels quite different... If you are used to the normal tab handling you will be confused with sidebery... a lot (you can reconfigure it to be more vanilla, but I had multiple problems configuring the plugins). The tab switching isn't at all obvious at times.

All in all I would recommend everyone to play around with containers and vertical tabs :) I know this little rant here went on a huge tangent from the article, but I wanted to clarify my experience with the named plugins.

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#108

Post by SquareWheel »

detritus wrote: post #73
ohgodplsno wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might need to get your vision checked. Each tab in a container gets a colored top border. And it's sizeable.

Your decision to be a dismissive smartarse really annoyed me, because of course i'm not that much of an idiot. Turns out that like another respondent here, animesh, I had 'browser.proton.enabled' set to false too from an attempt to fix my tabs last time FF buggered around with things. Setting that to TRUE has got the colours on. So, only slightly an idiot...

When I see anecdotes like this, I better understand why Mozilla is moving away from about:config. A thousand variables makes issues far more difficult to debug.

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#109

Post by lf-non »

Firefox containers are cool. I do wish though that they were better integrated with the rest of the browser eg. bookmarks , history, downloads etc.

I am aware that I can configure it to open certain sites in certain containers always, but that is not ideal in many cases eg. using github/gmail for both work & personal use.

I currently use an extension [1] that enables support for opening links in specific containers using custom protocol handler. So now I can have a launch-gmail.sh script that invokes

firefox 'ext+container:name=Google&url=https://mail.google.com'

to open the site in a specific container.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c...

Re: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

#110

Post by davidgerard »

commoner wrote: post #104
davidgerard wrote: post #82

Containers are a killer feature for Firefox, like having adblocking that works on mobile (unlike on Chrome). Just need containers on the mobile version.

There's a petition on ideas@mozilla for implementing containers in the mobile version of Firefox, if you'd like to vote for it: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/721603

Trouble is it apparently requires a lot of reimplementation deep in the guts of the mobile app; they do understand it's a highly-desired feature.
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