Comment by pentagrama
1 day ago
I’ve been using Firefox Containers for years through Mozilla’s Multi-Account Containers extension.[1] Now that container management is available directly in Firefox, I’d prefer to use the native implementation if possible.
Mozilla notes that the extension still adds some functionality:
> “Installing the Multi-Account Containers extension developed by Mozilla provides a few benefits on top of the native container functionality like site-specific container assignments, syncing across devices, and integration with Mozilla VPN or your own proxy.”[2]
I don’t currently need any of those additional features, so the native version would probably be enough for me. What I haven’t been able to figure out is how to switch without losing my existing setup. Are the containers created by the extension already shared with Firefox’s native container manager, or is there some migration process? Can I safely uninstall the extension and keep my existing containers, names, colors, icons, cookies, and active sessions?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
Back in like 2017? or 2018 when Containers came out for Firefox, I used the Multi-Account Containers Extension to manage QA testing of web apps, I'd have a container labeled for the user I wanted to log in as and test. It's insanely useful for the web.
What's also interesting is Tor Browser could probably take full advantage of containers later on, but I'm not sure if they would come up with a specific way of using it or just disable it.
> Can I safely uninstall the extension and keep my existing containers, names, colors, icons, cookies, and active sessions?
Great question.
As a very satisfied, long time user of 2 extensions in combination, Temporary Containers and Firefox Multi-Account Containers, I wonder the same thing.
I found out the hard way some time back that simply disabling (not even removing it) and re-enabling the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension would cause all the painstakingly set up containers and their saved credentials/data to get "lost".
If there were to be a way to "export" and "import" sets of named containers with their settings and data, that would be great for not losing which-site-maps-to-which-container-and-is-already-signed-in (whether natively or within an extension).
> site-specific container assignments
This is (or was, before I switched to Vivaldi) the killer feature of Firefox containers for me. I could banish certain tracking-heavy sites to their own containers so that they could only track where I've been on their own properties and not across the whole web. (Without having to remember to switch to their containers beforehand.) So I guess if I go back to Firefox, I'll still have to use the extension.
And maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought that containers did more than just separate the cookie jars? I really like using Vivaldi/Chrome's separate profiles because then I can have separate extensions/settings/polices/etc for each one. Some sites don't get along with certain extensions.
For me, this is almost an anti-feature. I still use it for a few sites, but the real killer feature of containers is that it becomes a breeze to use the same service with different accounts & identities, without logging in and out, and no shared state. Pinning a site to a container breaks that.
They are definitely orthogonal use cases. I find I prefer Profiles for different accounts/identities more than Containers (including profiles being very different windows of Firefox reducing confusion of which identity I'm looking at). Containers I like using for those hard privacy walls of pinned sites to avoid more "personalized" ads. But the flexibility exists to mix and match and use Containers and Profiles for either/both use cases. I don't think there's a "wrong way" to use them, just your personal preferred way.