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Comment by feanaro | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is any reason each tab isn't spawned in its own container. It seems the natural thing to do once you have implemented this, since it maximizes privacy. Unless the resource usage is the limiting factor, I don't see a downside. Am I missing something?

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That's what Containers on the Go does:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/containers-on...

It wasn't our core use-case, but there's a Web Extension API for others to build on!

Very interesting. I'm thrilled that there's a Web Extension API, this sounds like a killer feature.

Now if only Pentadactyl/Vimperator could be reproduced on top of Web Extensions without loss of functionality... ;-)

It breaks some webpages to do that and Mozilla unfortunately can't always just put user privacy above all else, because then webpage owners have little incentive to test their webpage in Firefox, as they'll make less money if they can't invade user privacy so much anymore.

Tor Browser has essentially what you described, so it's not the case that resource usage would be problematic.

Yes, I'm interested in the technical background of this supposed breakage. Having a container-per-tab is essentially the same as that tab being the only one open in the browser, from the webpage's perspective. How could that break anything?

Update: Nevermind, the right answer is that users probably expect that different tabs pointing to the same website share the same context.

You could open five tabs of Facebook, and you'd probably want each one to share its container with the four others unless you specifically want it not to.

True. It still seems like an unfortunate miss of opportunity since this is essentially an UI problem. It would be great if there was an option to switch the default the other way around: all tabs are opened in their own containers unless you open a tab by "cloning" from an existing tab (for instance, by right-clicking).

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