this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Firefox

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Do I still need containers? (Bonus: User account switching). (self.firefox)
submitted 2 years ago by wmrch to c/[email protected]
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I'm using the Firefox Multi-Account Containers Addon to reduce Google/Amazon and others following me around on the internet.

It's also useful to switch between multiple accounts on the same site.

I'm a little fed up with that addon though, mainly because it's impossible to set up a default container for a specific site (main account) while still being able to open that site in another container (alt account) when necessary.

I read something about how Firefox containerizes each tab automatically without any addon so that the Muli-Account Containers are redundant? Is there any truth to this?

How do you handle multiple accounts on websites?

Basically looking to get rid of the Multi-Account Container addon.

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[–] Nothingwise 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Firefox now isolates third-party cookies by default for all users. This means that you only need containers if you want to do something like:

  • Logging in to multiple accounts on the same site
  • Browsing sites that use cookies to limit how many articles you can read
  • Having private tabs in the same window as your regular tabs

If you want to remove the extension but not lose the functionality, it's possible to use about:config to manually enable containers by setting

privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled to true.

You can then edit your containers from about:preferences#containers

[–] Carighan 1 points 2 years ago

I use it for situations where I need to either visually differentiate certain tabs (due to the color) or split their cookies (example: My work has multiple systems that share similar information but in different contexts, this way they cannot have their informations mesh which makes testing easier).

[–] MrOtherGuy 1 points 2 years ago

Using containers manually works fine for my purposes. Like when you right-click the newtab-button or click-and-hold it, it will show a popup where you can select a container for the new tab. And there is a section in Options to create new containers.

I kinda think the manual controls don't show up normally, at least they didn't always and you had to enable them from about:config, but maybe that has changed since.