Experimental Firefox Feature Lets You Use Multiple Identities While Surfing the Web (techcrunch.com) 103
Firefox web browser has a new experimental feature that allows a user to segregate their online identities and sign in into multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers. From a TechCrunch report: This new "container tab" feature, which is now available in the unstable Nightly Firefox release channel, provides you with four default identities (personal, work, shopping, and banking) with their own stores for cookies, IndexedDB data store, local storage and caches. In practice, this means you can surf Amazon without ads for products you may have looked at following you around the web when you switch over to your work persona. As the Firefox team notes, the idea behind this feature isn't new, but nobody has figured out how to best present this new tool to users.
Firefox profiles (Score:1)
just use those.
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(Firefox profiles) just use those.
This is using the profiles, just differently and oriented around tabs instead of user-launched processes.
Re: Firefox profiles (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just have a per-site identity? In other words, tracking cookies become worthless because they can't follow you from site to site. And then within each site, allow multiple identities if desired (think private browsing, only data is retained if you desire it.)
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In other words, tracking cookies become worthless because they can't follow you from site to site
This effectively does that... just in a tab. Which is a lot easier for the average user to understand.
Privacy Badger (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just have a per-site identity? In other words, tracking cookies become worthless because they can't follow you from site to site.
You have, in effect, described EFF's Privacy Badger [eff.org] addon. It works heuristically to block cookies from leaking from their original domains, except when told otherwise (some exceptions are included by default -- so-called yellowlist, check out "How does Privacy Badger work?" section). I've been using it for some time and seems to work very well with little breakage. Rarely have to whitelist something.
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No, the idea is to simply switch the entire context (Mozilla profile ...or meta-profiles) whenever the domain in the location bar changes.
Browsers really should have been designed to have one cache / cookie db / history per visited site. That means referenced third-party content would see something different (a different 'identity') depending on what site you're actually 'at' in the location bar. The only exception would be the browser itself, which could populate the location bar history using all the sub-
Before Profiles (Score:4, Interesting)
Before FireFox had profiles, there was the MultiFox add-on. I used it. I liked it. It was easy to use. Unfortunately, Mozilla made a change that made it impossible for MultiFox to work, claiming the functionality was more properly implemented inside FireFox than as an add-on.
Unfortunately, it's taken far too long for Mozilla to do it.
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Same here, now I can only have the private window before I have to open another browser.
However I've found that plugins aren't properly isolated across profiles. For example if you have a normal and private window open and temp. allow a site in NoScript in one, the change takes effect in the other. Not good. A fix for this might be more useful than the container tabs.
one minor adjustment (Score:2)
As the Firefox team notes, the idea behind this feature isn't new, but nobody has figured out how to best present this new tool to users while maintaining the ability to track the user's online presence across all platforms .
ftfy
CAPTCHA: truest
Re: Firefox needs to veer hard to privacy. (Score:1)
Not true. The statistics include both, desktop and mobile, together. Firefox for desktop is doing fine, better than Chrome. But mobile is another story. Since most websites today are viewed from mobile browsers, it changes stats greatly in favor of browsers included with those platforms.
There is no stats about browser installations, but only website hits.
Asshat webmasters inflate Firefox stats (Score:2)
There are a lot of asshat webmasters that design websites that play "stupid webmaster tricks", depending on the user agent they sniff out. I use Pale Moon, a Firefox fork. For updates, it tends to revbump the version # by +0.1 when Firefox increments by +1.0.
Net result is that Pale Moon 26.2 is approximately equivalant to Firefox 39 or 43 or whatever it's at now. Go to an asshat website, and it refuses to let you in, whining about an "out-of-date unsupported browser". Yet if you lie to the website, and chan
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Generally, all "Gecko" browsers are clubbed together into Firefox stats, as far as I know.
I really don't understand why people use Pale Moon when it offers nothing over Firefox?!
If you really love the old look of the browser, you can simply get the Classic Theme Restorer [mozilla.org] extension and customise the browser UI as much as you want (which I also use).
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Chill out troll, you're going to have an aneurysm.
caniuse.com is a pretty rubbish place to get stats,
here, go direct to the source instead: http://gs.statcounter.com/ [statcounter.com]
I'd like to remind you, Firefox is a non-profit charitable organisation with a miniscule amount of funding for how much they have contributed to the open web and privacy!
Remember, they championed web standards compliance and the importance of the W3C and accessibility guidelines at a time when Microsoft wanted to make the web into a proprietary
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First of all, I completely agree with you about the "veer hard to privacy" idea.
Second, as a user of Phoen^WFirebir^WFirefox since about 0.5, who just lets the thing update instead of tryin
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Second, as a user of Phoen^WFirebir^WFirefox since about 0.5, who just lets the thing update instead of trying to customize it extensively (except for installing my favorite extensions, of course), it's been so long since 3.5 that I don't remember what the old UI was like anymore. Could you remind me what was so great about it?
- Full theming
- Fully customizable buttons and URLbar
- Status bar that buttons could be moved to
- Bookmarks sidebar
- History sidebar
- Tabs on bottom available
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Precisely the only two things in your list that are actually great, not just visual candy, are I think available in Firefox now:
- Bookmarks sidebar ctrl-b
- History sidebar ctrl-h
Using those all the time.
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Easily fixed using the great Classic Theme Restorer [mozilla.org] extension, which I've used ever since Australis (new skin) went live.
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Why must I go to palemoon to get 64 bit firefox?
Also, the money they get from Yahoo comes at a price. They are driving away casual users who will be annoyed about 5 times by being herded to Yahoo and then switch browsers rather than remove yahoo from their search list ( I don't hate yahoo, but I end up removing any trace of it to avoid getting it accidentally if yahoo is paying for this, then do they realize it's hurting them? )
Having driven away all their casual users, then why not appeal to savvy elites
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You need to remember that Mozilla is a non-profit charitable organisation which is a miniscule mouse compared to its competition, especially from one of the world's biggest multi-billion dollar spying corp empire Google (who are coincidentally, the biggest bribers [duckduckgo.com] ("lobbyist" [thewire.com]) to the US Government [businesspundit.com]).
Since no one ever donates to Mozilla, how else are their full-time staff and devs supposed to live in a world run by money?!
But you do make a good last point however, which is that since they can't appeal to the
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"How did this one slip through?"
Yes, LMAO too.
So unexpected that I was actually immediately wondering about what hidden corporate interest or developer insanity could be involved this time. Because seeing past experience, it must be something like that, right?
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Wow, what an amazingly ignorant comment.
Where do I start?!
I was going to write a long reply, but I don't think anyone is even reading this post any more, so I won't bother wasting my time.
I will however say that Mozilla has contributed more to the open web than any other company!
Secondly, Mozilla is a tiny non-profit (charitable) organisation, mostly volunteers, and yet people have the audacity to complain and compare to a multi-billion dollar spying corp empire like Google?!
Of course, Firefox is the only reason Mozilla ever had any relevance.
erm, Mozilla championed (along w
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perhaps your porn profile is used as your bank's secondary verification
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Ever heard of Selfdestructing cookies?
Tracking (Score:3)
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If you want to prevent tracking, on Firefox,Ghostery [mozilla.org] and uBlock Origin [mozilla.org] are your friends :) :)
That and a nice hosts file [mvps.org] will keep you out of a lot of trouble
This new Firefox feature sounds really sweet, this makes a lot of sense. If all the Operating Systems can support "multiple users", why can't our browsers, in 2016, support segregation of web sessions?
Make the frontier the Window, the browser instance, the tab, I don't care. Just give us the option to have multiple identities when connected and that's a
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I have firefox set up to start with the profile manager and my family selects their profile when they launch. it's easier for the livingroom TV that we all use ( especially for little ones ) if we don't need to sign in with a password, but can just click our own profile. Also I have a profile for shitposting and a seperate one for doing stuff as myself.
The only annoying thing is the clickbox that asks if you want to not show the profile manager any more that is periliously close to the ok button.
If anyone
Bring up profile manager from command line (Score:2)
> The only annoying thing is the clickbox that asks if you want to not show
> the profile manager any more that is periliously close to the ok button.
>
> If anyone clicks that, then firefox doesn't show the profilemanager even if
> you tell it to on the command line unless you manually edit the profiles.ini
This works in Pale Moon, and should work in Firefox, too. From the commandline
firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager
will bring up the profile manager dialogue. If it works from the command line it
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That did work, but I think that disables firefox sync which I do not want to do.
according to docs -no-remote disables sending or accepting of 'remote commands' which I believe are sync. I like sync.
So I am still stuck editing profile.ini whenever someone clicks that blasted checkbox
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Meant href not anchor
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If you want this now, you can have it. Simply have more than one profile, and tell the browser to start with a new instance using the new profile. This lets you make shortcuts / launchers / whatever that can be entirely separate, even if using the same browser.
For instance, I have two launchers for pale moon, one for general browsing, and another for email:
The first is the default with the "-new-instance" flag:
palemoon %u -new-instance
The second specifies a different profile:
palemoon -profile "/home/cfalc
Simple (Score:3)
No need to explain anything to grandma users etc whats happening. It just works.
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That would suck for people who use a multi-monitor workflow, or sites that legitimately make use of new-window / popups. Grandpa would sure have trouble grasping why it just DIDN'T work.
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Pop-ups need to die
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No. Lots of people like different things going on in the same Window. Personally I like the IE approach (I just threw up in my mouth but l'll deal with that shortly), where windows are colour grouped by opening additional tabs.
That way I can use my separate identity with e.g. Facebook and Twitter but the cookies and identities follow the "open in new tab" action but don't leak to other tabs in the same browser.
Now where's my mouthwash.
Nice! (Score:3)
Now I can troll on Slashdot without opening multiple browsers! This will increase my net comment trolling and 'cute animal liking' productivity at least 100%..
Arguing with myself on /. (Score:2)
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Astro-turfers delight? (Score:1)
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No, it will not.
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Right now, you can easily create any number of profiles, and you can automate them with scripting if you are a weapons-grade shill. Someone who keeps their site as shillfree as possible has additional tools, such as looking at the IP and browser-sent metadata. Someone who doesn't do that is already helpless before existing tech.
So it doesn't change the game in that department at all, nor does it escalate some fight. This is just to make your life easier. It doesn't make the life of sock puppeteers easie
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This won't protect against Fingerprinting. (Score:2)
And it doesn't claim to (this is mentioned in TFA). If privacy and security are concerns, don't consider this feature. It's a great way to help companies to correlate your online identities. With browser finger-printing, it wouldn't be too tricky for them to merge your online activity.
However, what if this were to be extended so that each contextual container allowed it's own settings / plugins / configuration / auto-complete / history data? This would at least make it equivalent to using different browser
How about... (Score:1)
I'd like to see a feature that lets me go more than a day or two without having to restart FF because it can't resolve a DNS address, while Chrome and even IE have no such problem.
Now get off my lawn with your experimental features!
Why only 4? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a usability expert by any means, so can anyone tell me why only four identities?
That seems pretty limiting to me, it should be the end user's choice how many identities to use.
Why not something simple like each *window* have separate data that's shared between tabs? Then you don't have any UI changes or usability problems.
Or is "it just works" an Apple patent or something?
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I'm not a usability expert by any means, so can anyone tell me why only four identities? That seems pretty limiting to me, it should be the end user's choice how many identities to use.
The fact that it comes with four doesn't automatically imply that advanced users can't define additional ones, or customize the list.
Even if it is limited to four, the fact that an experimental feature in nightly lacks that configurability doesn't imply that if it makes it to release it would still hard limited to four.
In other words, its good feedback, but its a bit early to "fail" the feature over it.
PS it sounds like its actually currently 5, the four named containers plus the 'default' container.
Why not something simple like each *window* have separate data that's shared between tabs? Then you don't have any UI changes or usability problems.
Some we
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"Why not something simple like each *window* have separate data that's shared between tabs? Then you don't have any UI changes or usability problems."
That could be confusing for people who WANT multiple windows that share sessions. I use a multi-monitor workflow, for instance. Some sites use new windows (often as popups) as part of their functionality.
Different but not better? (Score:2)
multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers
I like having (to use) multiple bowsers for this. It means I can have a different desktop icon for each one. Want to do "general purpose" surfing? use the default. Want to log in to FB? Use a firefox that has a different database, history, cookie location and remembered passwords - not quite a sandbox, but good enough.
And so it goes on. It is quite easy and sounds more straightforward than that stuff about containers.
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There is likely to be a way to set up separate desktop icons to launch instances of Firefox using a specific identity if you so wish.
Right-click
properties
Shortcut tab
"Change Icon" button
Exact details will differ between civilized OSes. Uncivilized OSes may have this association stored in home/ui/dsktp/cns/lk as what appears to be a plaintext file but mixes plaintext and binary flag characters without warning.
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You could still do that with commandline options that specify a profile.
What I do with firefox is I have different profiles and select one using the profile manager.
Then I have different skins for each profile, so I don't accidentally type something into the wrong window and embarass myself. I have a 'red profile' for shitposting ( actually Samurai Jack themed ) and a green profile ( green for money ) that I use my real name on, and do banking and buying stuff. My red profile doesn't get my credit card
This has been needed for a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
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What trend are you talking about? How do cookies see each other? Cookies for a given domain are meant to be given to the server by the browser along with an http request. That domain is allowed to set cookies upon an http response. This is how it works now and has worked for quite some time.
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Because this feature seperates them the work example.com cookie won't be shared with the Slashdot example.com cookie.
Some browsers allow disabling 3rd party cookies, but that tends to cause issues with SSO and isn't the general default. I currently use self-destructing cookies which causes cookies out-of-scope to vanish, which also solves
uMatrix (Score:4, Informative)
All 3rd party cookies.
All 3rd party scripts.
All iFrames.
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RequestPolicy Continued - blocks by default:
Literally every 3rd party request, including images (e.g. tracking pixels).
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RequestPolicy - even before it was forked was pretty awesome compared to AdBlock and co, but uMatrix just takes it to another level - most gen
Incognito mode (Score:1)
Simultaneous Multiple Personality Disorder? (Score:2)
Good start, but... (Score:1)
Cookies aren't the only way advertisers identify users. What about adding many of the other pieces (UA string, list of extensions, HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, language support, time zone, etc.)?
I'd like to see the browser randomly change as many of these as possible (don't even make them unique to the same session).
See https://panopticlick.eff.org
They missed one (Score:1)
I know the private/incognito mode is for that, but if you gone create default profiles, let's not be prude about it.
Not very useful (Score:1)
Most ad networks use much more than cookies & cache to identify you.
Flash cookies, user agent, screen resolution, installed fonts, plugins, etc.
Here's an open source library to do exactly that:
https://github.com/Valve/finge... [github.com]
Good News! (Score:2)
Why Firefox is falling behind Chrome (Score:1)
This might be one of the reasons Firefox has been losing market share to Chrome. Chrome has had this feature for some time already, I use it every day to manage my home and work accounts. Even bookmarks are managed separately for each account.
It's good to see Firefox catching up. It's a great browser, I hope they don't stop there!
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Chrome has had "profiles" since Chrome 16. They do exactly this. not approximately. exactly.
Incorrect. Profiles, (which, BTW, also exist in FF, and have for a long time now), allow one to launch separate instances of the browser, with separate settings, extension, cookies, etc. FF's latest nightlies allow for different profiles within the same browser instance, so you only have to start your browser once to have multiple profiles available simultaneously.
I won't try this new feature, because I abandoned FF proper when they forced Australis on users. But if the feature ever makes its way into Pale