I hate all three. I understand some of the decisions but other ones are frustrating.
Let me explain what I used to do. What I used to do, is take advantage of the fact that firefox profiles are completely separate instances of firefox, each with their own settings and extensions. I would run my personal profile with highly aggressive and experimental settings, because I was ok with it crashing if it meant I learned interesting things. On the other hand, the profiles related to schoolwork and other more important tasks would be defaults, so they would be much more stable. I no longer consider this a necessary feature, but it was fun to play with.
The other big reason why I relied on the old profiles, is because they have separate cookies and whatnot, which is useful for when I want to have an account for each profile. Although Google happily lets you sign into multiple accounts from the same browser, Microsoft, Discord, and many other apps do not, and force you to sign out before signing in again.
But this is painful. Things never open in the profile I want them to by default, which is annoying. In theory, and I am considering doing this, the way to fix it is by creating app menu shortcuts for each profile, and then having them be the apps I select whenever I want to open a website link or file (with no default profile/app set, so I just select every time).
In addition to that, each profile had to have it’s own mozilla account for syncing, which was annoying.
Containers seemed like a nice in between. I could use a single mozilla account for sync, but have seperate microsoft or other accounts on the same browser instance.
Except nope, they actually suck and don’t work like that. I can’t decide a window is dedicated to a container, so all tabs from xyz site will open in that container and give me that account. It constantly prompts me and it’s painful and the UX for what I’m trying to do is miserable.
Containers seem designed more for isolating cookies between two different sites, rather than hiding instances of sites from themselves. Like the original version was a “facebook container”, which would hide the facebook cookies from other sites, but I don’t want that. I want to be able to log into multiple facebook accounts (hypothetically, I don’t actually have a single facebook account but you get the idea).
The new profiles, if you’ve heard of them, somehow manage to combine the worst of both worlds. Firstly they are an entirely separate system and can’t be managed by the second profile system. But they exist within a single one of the old profiles, meaning I can’t do tricks with desktop shortcuts to make apps open in one profile or the other. But at the same time, despite existing within one profile, they each require seperate Mozilla accounts for sync.
I am very frustrated, but als resetting up my system so I am considering what to do. I am probably going to continue with profiles, but add app menu shortcuts for them.
Any better ideas?
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Containers seem designed more for isolating cookies between two different sites, rather than hiding instances of sites from themselves. Like the original version was a “facebook container”, which would hide the facebook cookies from other sites, but I don’t want that. I want to be able to log into multiple facebook accounts (hypothetically, I don’t actually have a single facebook account but you get the idea).
Containers work fine for isolating two logged in sessions of the same site; I do that all the time. I suggest trying the Simple Tab Groups extension for a better UI though.
Can I make it so that an entire window defaults to a single container or something of the sort? I really like the profiles UX, where it’s one window per “task set” of work, play, etc.
I’d open an issue/request here: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/#readme
The way I use Simple Tab Groups, I have a bunch of different groups and when a particular group is open, any new tab opened in that group is automatically in the container I associated with the group. e.g. I made a “fun” group, and all tabs are automatically opened in the personal container; in my “shopping” group all the tabs are opened in the shopping container – if I tried to visit lemmy in the shopping container I would see it from a logged out perspective, but I could also log into a different lemmy account (if I had one) and switch back and forth between them just by changing the group.
Only tabs from the specific group are shown while I have that group selected in STG. (The rest are hidden.) I can quickly switch back and forth between different contexts that way and often do so dozens of times a day.
I usually use just one window for Firefox though and change the group to switch context within in. Testing quickly, if I open two windows, it looks like I can tell STG to switch to a different group in the other window, but since I don’t use it like that regularly, there may be gotchas I’m not aware of.
You might run into some issues if you’re using Firefox’s newer built-in tab grouping feature though; the extension is older than that feature and doesn’t really work particularly well with it. I have it disabled and just use STG for grouping. I think I did that by setting
browser.tabs.groups.enabledto false inabout:config? It’s been a while though.Do you use simple tab groups method of opening tabs, or is it possible to interept the firefox new tab button and/or Cntrl+T for opening tabs?
I mostly use Ctrl-T, but the new tab button also works. I set a specific container in the “Always open tabs in container” section of each group’s settings under “Manage Groups” in STG and after I load something in a new tab, it binds to the container I specified automatically. It’s pretty easy to set it up that way and, to me, at least, feels natural.
There are some other options there too if you want to do things like always load particular sites in particular groups based on a pattern, but I don’t use them personally.
I tried this initially but it didn’t seem to work for me. When I would open a new tab while in a tab group it would just be in the default/ungrouped with no container.
I’m gonna try tinkering with this further after I wake up.
For whatever reason, new/blank tabs don’t show up as attached to a container, but once you actually load something in it, it should be bound to the container if you set that option I mentioned.
I can try to post some screenshots later if you’re still having trouble.
Aha! That seems to be it. The tabs in a window do get automatically assigned to a container.
Except this only seems to work on one window at once. It’s a bit painful to create tab groups for every relevant window, for task sets that I want to isolate to the same container (like when I am working on two classes at once).
Also, is it possible to get links that are opened from outsie firefox to open in the correct container?
