Comment by lukeschlather
1 day ago
I use profiles for this, I wonder what the tradeoffs are between the two approaches. I've actually been thinking about building some tools to make it easier to create and manage profiles on the fly. For me I really think profiles are better since the boundaries are harder - there's no worry about accidentally hitting the "log in with Google" button and clearly identifying myself to a site or similar, because I read the news in a separate profile from my Google account. And it would be nice if those sort of guardrails were very intuitive and easy to set up by default. But I feel like containers may be too squishy.
Profiles and Containers are a bit of a peanut butter and jelly situation. There's uses for both separately, there's a strong intersection of what they do well that you use either for (topping a slice of toast), and then together they also can make a beautiful sandwich.
Profiles form very different windows. You can decorate them to make them obvious at a glance which Profile is which. Up until recent Profile improvements, switching between them and managing them used to be a lot of work, including managing which one was the default for links from other applications.
Containers are tabs in a shared window. They get marked with a subtle color bar (the colors you choose for each container) and that's mostly it, they otherwise "blend in" to the same shared window. Reopening tabs in a different container is easy. Opening new tabs in a different container is easy. Containers share a few more things than Profiles do (but are still isolated in important ways such as cookies).
I have every site that needs my Google account pinned to always open in a specific container. The boundary is hard where I need it (the privacy protections) but soft for make workflows easier. If I find a YouTube embed in the wild somewhere that needs a login for one of the many restrictive reasons some do, I just click the normal link (or middle click for new tab) and YouTube opens in my Google container automatically. I don't need to copy paste between windows (or use Sync's sometimes slow tab sync engine). If I accidental hit a "log in with Google" button it opens up in the Google container and I know something is wrong because I don't expect random other websites in that container. (Relatedly, I finally installed uBlock Origin not to get rid of ads, but solely to get rid of that awful annoying content-obscuring popup for Google login on sites like Medium. I feel like there should be far more backlash on Google for being a bad actor doing that.)
I also use Profiles for alternate identities, things where a very different looking window are helpful to know I'm in the right place. Containers and Profiles are useful together.
the benefit of containers is that they are all in the same browser. all your settings, extensions, remembered passwords, etc. apply to all containers and you can more easily reopen a site in a different container.
i don't get the login with google problem. you would be logged in in one container and not in any of the others. unless you open a site in your "google container", nothing will happen. the container where you log in to google should automatically stay logged in anyways (i am not sure, i don't use google login, but it works like that for many other logins, hackernews for example) so you should never be tempted to hit that login with google button. the separate process only helps you if you save the google password in the browser. if you are like me and don't store passwords in the browser then the containers have the advantage that it is easier to check if you are in the right container instead of making sure you are in the right profile, unless you use themes to differentiate your profiles.
> the benefit of containers is that they are all in the same browser. all your settings, extensions, remembered passwords (...)
YMMV that's exactly the downside of containers for me xD
Since Firefox (nightly) introduced multi profiles support I didn't looked back - requires some initial setup as you pretty much need to configure browser from scratch, but that full separation works way better for me - especially that you can e.g. configure same plugin in slightly different way per profile (ad blockers, password managers etc.); and somehow under macos when I have currently active profile and I click on some links (e.g. in slack) it picks up that active profile correctly
Working with multiple profiles is painful as you have to duplicate setup, and data for extensions such as uMatrix isn't shared.
Also I would like each Firefox profile running instance to have its own icon at OS (desktop) level (Ubuntu, Windows) to ease switching.
[dead]