The nice bonus feature is you can have certain sites default to containers. I had a paid YouTube account for a while, for example, so having any YouTube link open in my personal account was nice for not getting hit with ads on initial click due to my default Gmail not being the right one.
There's also a plugin[2] that will make any new tab default to whatever the first tab listed is. Really great for if you want to have a whole browser window dedicated to one container.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sticky-window...
Works really well with Mullvad which has a SOCKS proxy setup only available when connected.
Great for work connections too, I've setup all work/business websites to auto-open in a "work" container which I've created a local bridge proxy for to ensure my work connections are always over the corporate VPN.
This is also really good if you consult or work with many customers - you can start to build a catalogue of containers with specific settings for those customers.
Container Proxy addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
Great for all kinds of silly GeoIP restrictions, too - in my part of the world, homedepot.com just spits out "access denied", a foodnetwork.com recipe you find in search results just redirects you to the tudiscovery.com homepage, etc.
So they redirected me to the Dutch version because I'm in a nominally Dutch-speaking region, and I had no option to get it in English. I had to go with half-translated French until I noticed that I could replace the "fr" in the URL with "en", and actually get to an English-language website.
The region-based redirection was annoying enough, and the half-assed translation job was expected, but not even providing an easy way to get back to English is really idiotic.
I still wish I had some kind of system that would automatically use a connection in the right country for geoblocked content. For now I just use SSH proxies to (my own) strategically located servers combined with Firefox Containers and Container Proxies, but it's all manual.
One of the permissions you have to grant to the container proxy add on is:
“Access your data for all websites”
That’s not acceptable.
edit: Apparently this is bad info. I'll have to give it a try again.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-boss/
Is there any reason to also use facebook container if you already have multi-account containers?
https://medium.com/@stoically/enhance-your-privacy-in-firefo...
https://github.community/t/using-one-account-for-all-your-pr...
Right now I manually type ?authuser=1 into my URLs to have Google Docs open in the right account, but this breaks when I restart the browser and the page reloads with the wrong account... Why Google removes this parameter from URLs after loading is beyond me.
And then when I click back to the work container and try to access mail.google.com I get:
"400. That’s an error.
The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That’s all we know."
Bug? It seems like a really messy UI. Why can't they make Multi-Account Containers work just like Facebook Container? Or have make 1 window == 1 container?
e.g. I have that Facebook Container, and I also have a Slack container I just put together in the usual way by opening my Slack session (it's for the main social group I hang out with, during the pandemic) inside a Container with a pink theme and icon.
Suppose three friends send me a funny Youtube video of kittens, one sends it on Slack, one on Facebook, one literally sends me a postcard with the URL on it.
In Facebook, it's inside the Facebook container. Since the Facebook Container has no idea who I am, Youtube presents adverts and of course there's no way to add the video to my "Fun kitten videos" list. But if I tell Youtube to open this now the tab is not Facebook, a no-referrer link opens with the URL and now in my default context which has Youtube Premium, so there are no adverts and I can add this to my lists. As far as Facebook is concerned I apparently just left. Unless Google tells them I watched that video they are none the wiser.
Slack is inside the Slack container. So again, no Youtube account, adverts. But if I open the Youtube page that's still inside the Slack container, so still no Youtube account. I need to explicitly get the URL and paste it into a not Slack tab to get my default context.
The link from the postcard obviously I get to choose which context to type it into the URL bar, although maybe the UX of typing random Youtube URLs in isn't great.
thanks for the sticky windows tip
Last I checked, I'd have to enumerate every Google domain and subdomain, which just seemed like too much work. But if others have already done this, itd be easy to just use theirs.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
You can use this. It's a fork of Facebook Container, but for Google.
This one is a fork for Amazon https://github.com/krober/contain-amazon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contain-amazo...
Twitter: https://github.com/v1shwa/contain-twitter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-conta...
There's a few more too
AFAICT private Firefox windows are also part of the same container so you don’t get true separation (can’t open multiple Firefox private windows and log into different google accounts — does that work in Safari?)
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/author/olivia-scholes
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/
I'm also increasingly using it to keep their various properties isolated from each other (eg. keeping Bing separate from the rest of Microsoft) to reduce tracking even further.
!*.atlassian.net , Atlassian
!*.bing.com , Microsoft Bing
!*.bitbucket.org , Atlassian
!*.github.com , Github
!*.google.com , Google
!*.imdb.com , Amazon Home/Personal
!*.linkedin.com , Microsoft LinkedIn
!*.live.com , Microsoft
!*.microsoft.com , Microsoft
!*.nytimes.com , New York Times
!*.reddit.com , Reddit
!*.twitter.com , Twitter
!*.youtube.com , Google
amazon.com , Amazon Home/Personal
console.aws.amazon.com , Amazon AWS
music.amazon.com , Amazon Home/Personal
news.ycombinator.com , Hacker News
smile.amazon.com , Amazon Home/Personal
www.amazon.com , Amazon Home/Personal
I wish we'd stop being so hard on products. It's likely those developers read these comments. Having babies be called ugly by your peers is rough, actively trying to be more respectful on the internet leads to a nicer industry.
EDIT: Just to clarify - I'm not saying your intention was disrespectful. I've written many comments similar to this, and continue to do so, but I've started to try and curb it because I imagine it's what YouTubers feel like reading their comments section.. But this is by our own peers in our industry.
Containerise and Cookie Autodelete together are indeed a very good addition to uBlock and uMatrix, and if you already have some Regular Expression classification rules written for Cookie Autodelete, setting up Containerise is very quick. It works like a charm even with the Firefox Multi Account Containers extension itself disabled.
While I do agree with some reply-ers that @pkulak's critical wording was a bit strong in the sibling comment here, I have been incredibly frustrated with the default "Multi-Account Containers" add-on.
They have a facility to delete domains from a container, but no facility to add one: something I would've thought would be one of the first things one would want to implement. I understand resources are not always plentiful, but they've added a bunch of other features and yet this one is still lacking.
This is especially infuriating for "intermediate" domains forming parts of a redirect (Google have changed their subdomain structure recently and placing different Google properties into separate containers is now impossible with Multi-Account Containers due to their redirect structure)
The pattern-matching feature in `containerise` looks even better again.
Hoping it works as well as it looks; going to give it a try now.
So far only the Google/FB container add-ons do this right.
https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers/wiki/Globa...
If you are talking about the Temporary containers extension, that's not the case. The extension is not the most easy to use, but it certainly supports opening Spotify in a different container when clicking a link in FB. You either don't have the Navigation→Target Domain set to Different from Tab Domain & Subdomains or you have Exclusion Patterns set which exempt Spotify.
And when I finally fall asleep, I dream of internet without the monsters.
- Temporary Containers[0]
- Google Container[1]
- Google Container w/ Integrations (YouTube, AdTech, Apps, etc)[2]
- Reddit Container[3]
There are a few others[4] as well, but I've found the Temporary Containers solves the 80%.
--
[0] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
[2] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
[3] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contain-reddi...
[4] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=Container
This extension to Multi-Account Containers looks great at first -- its Automatic mode spins up a new container each time you open a new tab, then switches that tab to an existing container, should one be associated with the TLD you visit.
The problem is that Temporary Containers does not delete these temporary containers. They accumulate in the MAC containers list. There is no way to mass delete them, nor set them to auto-delete when the tab is closed.
These WILL sync to your Firefox account and reappear on every machine. Over 3000 temp container made MAC unusably laggy. This was so destructive of my MAC experience that I uninstalled both extensions. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is no way to reset the data MAC syncs to Firefox Account.
Are you setting this option to something else?
Temporary Containers works really well for me. I have per domain isolation, which only breaks very very few sites (Gmail and Outlook 365). For those I have regular persistent containers. Alternatively, I can always open a new private window where I don't have this plugin active.
uBlock Origin + Temporary Containers + ClearURLs are a great setup for privacy and security. Actually, I don't need much else aside from a VPN and a few settings in my user.js.
The only thing I miss is Vimperator. Modern alternatives are full of glitches because of inherent limitations in the WebExtensions API.
Are you sure you didn't accidentally change it?
import json
with open('containers.json.bac') as f:
s = f.read()
j = json.loads(s)
ids = [i for i in j['identities'] if not i['name'].startswith('tmp')]
print(len(j['identities']), len(ids))
j['identities'] = ids
with open('containers.json', 'w') as wf:
wf.write(json.dumps(j))Just go to about:debugging, click on "This Firefox", locate the extension and click the "Inspect" button. In the case of MAC this should lead you to about:devtools-toolbox?type=extension&id=%40testpilot-containers
In the devtools that open you need to go to the Console tab and run this command:
await browser.storage.sync.clear()
await browser.storage.sync.get()At least this way yo won't end up with unusable FF because of the thousands of undeletable temporary containers.
I used to delete manually each container when this happened, through about:preferences container manager, but now there is no more this in Preferences and to remove containers through the Multi-Container extension isn't the best thing.
Tried do that by editing some files too but the hundreds os containers keep reappearing after few days, or on new installations.
If I'm in FB Messenger and click an external link I don't want that link to be opened in the FB container.
I wanted to keep the soccer club administrator, school website, etc. Google identities separate and distinct.
Perhaps things have changed and this isn't an issue anymore. What I did was create an identity (soccer, PTA) for each gmail account and set defaults for google.com, YouTube.com, etc.
Having MTTSCPresident@gmail.com is really nice for being able to give someone else the password and let them take over the account when your term is done.
Special mentions for polluting search results: Quora, Pinterest
Is Google still planning to destroy adblock with Manifest V3?
Because of the Don't Stand Out principle one of the most important factors for success of ECH is the deployment of ECH GREASE, which is to say, willing clients just claiming they want to do ECH even when talking to servers that don't really have any hidden services at all. Chrome's participation in that probably makes a real difference to whether anybody actually tries to block it.
It isn't perfect though. My main issues are that it's a separate window so sometimes clicking on the side window or the main window draws focus instead of clicking the thing under my cursor. Also the search bar in the sidebar keeps getting accidentally activated when I hit command-T. So I ended up inspecting and deleting the element. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works well enough.
I've tried FF a couple times a year ever since Quantum came out, but on my MBP it's just much slower than Brave.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl...
I also use the Firefox multi-account containers to set a temporary container for every new tab. To not lose logins etc I'm websites I visit frequently, I set up dedicated containers for those. Work very well.
Anyone else with experience of the Firefox multi-account container extension?
The terminology is a little confusing: Containers or "Container Tabs" is a session-management tool that's baked into Firefox, while Multi-Account Containers is an extension on top of that that allows you to automatically sort specific domains into containers, so when I open e.g. a YouTube link it automatically appears in a YouTube container, which knows nothing about my Google account. IMO the functionality of the extension (which was written by Mozilla) should be added to the browser itself.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Right now I use safari, chrome, firefox, and edge to keep the four identities I use for different projects separate thanks to Google not playing nice at all with the GCP account you are using not being the primary Google Signin.
In fairness, some of those sites might not even know the like button is used for tracking and just think it's for helping them grow their facebook audience.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/first-party-i...
The majority of cookies don't break much at all. Or at least not that I notice; I've been blocking all cookies, including first party, for a few months, using uMatrix.
Obviously you need them for logins[1]. You need them on Twitter to view the old version of the site that doesn't require js. On YouTube, to view comments. To follow some redirects on the Android developer docs site.
[1] ...mostly. Some actually store all the login info in js state (and presumably localstorage?).
There's a reason why Segment just sold for $3.2 billion... [edited to add: They offer a single integration point and will proxy your data server-side to hundreds of other companies.]
Most of the sites I visit seem not to recognize me without cookies but I always wonder if it's just a "ploy" to make me feel untracked.
While I'm at it, anyone has good resources on how not to be finger printed (without going full Tor browser)? Do I have to disable Javascript?
So that means use as much of the standards as possible that comes with the OS. Do not use anything that would not be considered mainstream (e.g. don't be the only person from Guatemala on Opera, Linux, DVORAK Keyboard using an odd screen resolution.)
The absolute hardest thing to create a browser fingerprint on is corporate laptops as they have identical setups!
I know about Privacy Badger and they provide some protection but not from all fingerprinting. Their statement about is:
https://privacybadger.org/#Does-Privacy-Badger-prevent-finge...
---
Privacy Badger can detect canvas based fingerprinting, and will block third party domains that use it. Detection of other forms of fingerprinting and protections against first-party fingerprinting are ongoing projects.
---
Also, weird you mention dvorak. I know this is just a hyperbole for the joke of being an easy to identify linux hacker... but keymap is the one thing you can't use for fingerprinting... well, you are able to use the language (by detecting typed in keycodes and matching against a mimum denominator of keymaps) but not the keymap itself (e.g. no way to see qwerty-US vs dvorak-US, but easy to detect -US vs -DE for example)
Ironically, this also means you should not enable your browser's "Do not track" preference.
So even if your fingerprint is unique, it would be a new unique fingerprint every 5 minutes. Maybe there's a logical fault with this plan, but, so far, I'm not seeing it.
Isn't this exactly how it prevents FB from tracking you? Those "various other things" that it uses will all be different between different containers. I think the source IP thing is a valid point, which is why other commenters have pointed out that you can force your FB container to connect through a proxy, while your other containers don't.
But my biggest issue is Firefox performance on MacOS. The only reason it's not my primary browser is because Safari is just so much better.
What I wonder is, is this just me, or does everyone have this problem?
What performance issues specifically do you notice?
I mean, what did we do to ourselves? How the hell did we ruin the web experience this much?
Looking back in the 90s, the web wasn't the most pretty thing but how simple it was. You went to a news website and that was it. Click, read, the end.
These days however:
- Go to a news/content website
- wait for the 40MB of useless CSS and JS "minified" crap to download.
- Agree with 2 or 3 huge popups to allow collect your data
- Get a new popup to make you disable your ad-blocker plugin. And if you disable it, you need to refresh the page all over again.
- Get a "subscribe to our newsletter" popup
- Get tracked by amazons, facebooks, etc...
- And once you finally click on an article.... get another popup to subscribe to their premium paid content...
Seriously, we broke the web, and now we are trying to fix it with putting more plugins and tools on top of this problem. I just feel the web is fighting against us and our browsers, and in the end everyone will loose.
Additionally, web browsers were never built for easy monetization of web content; being under the control of the end user.
So now I have a script to create/remove new UNIX users with a pre-configured firefox profile and a script to run the firefox under that user.
It has some quirks, but also some benefits. Mainly that the browser doesn't have access to all files on my computer, and the separation between profiles is enforced by the OS, which I trust more.
Note that this doesn't diminish the effectiveness of uBO/PB at blocking requests — but I think most of their users don't realize how much easier it is to identify who uBO/PB users are, relative to the rest of the world on less obvious setups.
The best out of the box way you could do it with Firefox is to setup different profiles and switch between them, however, while there is a many-to-many relationship between website and containers, there is none between bookmarks and containers, thus you'd have to manually switch to the right container.
My workaround for this was to setup a thin server that redirects amazon<\d+>.localhost to amazon.com. Then, on Firefox, I bind each amazon(1-6).localhost to its own container and configure it to always open this site in its container. Now every time I type "amazon2" it will open up amazon.com in its right container.
Would have wished to have bookmarks granularity as part of Firefox, but for my use case, this is the best I could come up with in few minutes of work.
One severe use case limitation (for me) involves using containers to separate work/home accounts. I am a developer, so I do a lot of screen sharing / presenting.
Theoretically, I could use Firefox containers to separate things into "work" and "personal."
However, all containers have a shared autocomplete history for the URL bar.
1. Suppose I visit "GirlsXXX.com" in my "Personal" container 2. The next day at work, I am screen-sharing and using my "Work" container 3. I type in "github.com" so that I can visit Github.com 4. As I type "g-i-t-h-u-b", "GirlsXXX.com" will be one of the autocomplete suggestions after I've types "g" and "gi"
Unfortunately, I don't trust a third party extension with this either.
I wonder, does this fix the Google reCAPTCHA problem with using multiple browser profiles?
I guess they don't want my business. Good thing I gave it a few days before connecting the Quest.
I just got an alert saying my recent Amazon purchase "May have been lost in transit". I went to place a duplicate order only to find each product's price ~15% higher than when I placed my original order. Such a dirtbag pricing strategy....they should call it the monopoly algorithm
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I have a 'home' container (= sidebar 'tab' of tabs), 'personal code' container (ditto), 'finance' (ditto), and 'work' (ditto). It's not even really that I want to silo their data from each other (I have uMatrix - yes I know, will probably switch to nuTensor - and autocookie delete etc. anyway) - but the organisation into contexts I can easily switch between is amazing.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tab...
Answering my own question: Yes you can -> https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/2032834846972583
One thing the Multi-Account-Container does is allow you to redirect a website to open in a specific container. My extension gives the extra feature of assigning the container itself to a default website.
The main use case is when you have a container dedicated to say, YouTube, it makes sense that when you open a new tab in your ‘YouTube Container’ it should go directly to YouTube. Of course you can open other things but the extension provides a convenient default behavior.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-def...
I would definitely go back to Firefox if it has adblock in iOS.
The thing with the most potential on iOS is Lockdown, a local-only firewall which filters network connections from any application. It'll break apps like Facebook Messenger if you turn on all the options. But again, it's focused on trackers, not ads specifically.
Is it something about 3rd party scripts that uBlock Origin doesn't block by default and that don't require 3rd party cookies?
I'm not looking for a general answer about containment or sandboxing or a nice user experience for separating environments or profiles; I'm looking for a precise attack/tracking vector that makes this worth switching browsers for.
[1] https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/news/nfl/week-7-opening-li...
If you isolate your session with Facebook container then they can only tie your pageviews to an anonymous profile and will have a much harder time tracking you across devices, connections, etc.
I got logged out of Facebook after installing it (either by the extension or by FB) and then when I log back in FB asks me to "complete the following steps to regain access to your account" with a button that brings me to an error page. They also mention that this behavior was triggered by me having 2FA enabled on my Facebook account.
So I'm interested but beware right now (especially 2FA people).
Edit: Concerningly, the FB error page still has a 2019 copyright ^_^;
Edit 2: This was resolved by using the FB app to verify logins and restored my access in firefox.
The elephant in the room is the default Google integration in Firefox, I guess? They don't speak too much about that kind of tracking.
1) How is this different from a regular Firefox container you use for Facebook?
2) Firefox containers are essentially the same as Chrome profiles, right?
I'm just trying to figure out what benefit this has over someone keeping Facebook inside a separate profile in Chrome. If Mozilla's trying to attract people from Chrome... I feel like they need to be a bit clearer on what precisely Mozilla provides that Chrome doesn't?
For 2: I'm not familiar with Chrome profiles, but Firefox has profiles as well. And with Firefox you can set up different container settings for different profiles. So you can have container settings for a "Home" profile and a separate container settings for a "Work" profile
If you haven’t in a while, go check out “Settings for websites” on Safari desktop and mobile. It’s some pretty sane and reasonable stuff.
But do I need a container extension for each of those sites or what is the deal here? And do I exit the container when I click a link to another domain?
And also the Temporary Containers addon if you want cookies, local storage, and history cleared automatically: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Here is my workflow:
- Normal browsing: not logged in, no containers.
- YouTube: have an "Entertainment" container for it and use it logged out since Google signs you on all their property, and I don't want to mix my entertainment history with my educational history.
- Social media: have a "Social" container where I access all the data harvesters.
- Logged in: For anything that I need to be signed up, a "Personal" container, so I can check my email in peace.
- Work: here's the catch, this needs it's own profile. Since "YouTube" is set to always open in the "Entertainment" account, and I don't want work related videos pop up when relaxing, and vice-versa, I can switch profiles and have everything completely isolated in my "Work" profile. And in case I need to, I can set up more containers in this profile. Also there are different add-ons I need for my own setup compared to work, or the same add-on with different configuration. So just containers won't do here.
My point is, if Firefox had a profile switcher as easy to use as Chromium had, my life would be way better. Profiles and Containers seem to complement each other. They just need a truckload of polish.
Some things that annoy me right now:
- There is no dedicated UI for profile CRUD. And an add-on won't work for this since it needs to be available and enabled by default across profiles.
- "Reopen in container" opens a new tab instead of replacing the current.
- Having keybindings for the two above would be extremely useful.
- For some reason, Firefox lacks the functionality to change the ordering of stuff (in general, but more specifically profiles and containers). The creation order is all you get.
- A quick way to do "clear cookies/data in this container only" so I don't need to delete/recreate the container and mess up my ordering (which I can not change). Also clear data for non container use without clearing data in containers. Basically treating non container use as a "Default" container.
- All of the above I wish came by default with Firefox and not from an add-on. My honest opinion is that they are crucial functionality and deserve to be made aesthetically pleasing and available for everyone to use.
To use Facebook login on a site, you'll need to add the website to the Facebook Container. Follow the directions from the docs[1]. This will stop you from having to turn the extension on and off entirely.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/blob/master/docs...
But to actually answer: you can remember cookies etc., they're just only accessible within that container silo, versus private/incognito windows where they're deleted (by design) when you close that tab.
I dearly wish that I was able to purge cookies/local storage on a per-container basis.
It is a great feature.
I would bet $100 FB does geolocate your IP to determine if it's likely a single residence or a larger multi-user building, and likely tracks that, but that misses a large chunk of their user base.
Imagine the number of people who use FB as a distraction at work or in class, but might not use it as much at home.
I hope this comes to Firefox for Android soon!
there's been a firefox ticket open for this for a while now.
You may be better off not playing with the creepy neighbor.
EDIT: I am confused why nobody sees the obvious.