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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

The Containers add-on[0] for Firefox that Mozilla makes has satisfied my need for partitioning. It's on a per-tab basis and also lets you define certain domains to automatically open in a specific container (e.g. Jira always opens in my Work container).

I can't really speak to Firefox's performance issues though. I feel like they're just as good on rendering and JS speed, but the overall UI doesn't have the same "fast" feel that Chrome does. Chrome has also seemingly gotten slower for me too.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

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I use the containers add on, and it's pretty much the only real advantage FF has over chrome.

Still need user switching although, because sometimes I want to separate multiple google/twitter/etc accounts for example and still want the automatic url-based container activation.

If brave implemented containers although, I would probably use it because chrome works better than FF.

If you run Firefox with the -P command line argument, a profile selection screen comes up in which you can create multiple profiles. These are completely separated (down to the HSTS state!) "accounts".

I don't know how MacOS works, but if you set your Firefox shortcut to firefox -P you can switch profiles by restarting Firefox. Granted, it's not as nice as Chrome, but it might still be of worth to you in some way.

I know about the -P command, that is why I was referencing the -no-remote option ;) Firefox has multi-user, it's just janky.

You have to double click on your special shortcut with the command line option, and if some other program tries to open a url with firefox as the default browser with the -no-remote / -P command, then it will just not work if you have all users open.

While with chrome it's 2 clicks away and no edge cases making other apps opening urls not work.

Every time the containers add-on gets updated, it forgets all your preferences.

I've been using containers for some time now (probably since not long after it was announced) to keep my twitter accounts separate, and I've never had to reset or update my preferences.

On at least 3 separate occasions now I've gone to open a container tab, and found that I was back to the default set of (Work, Personal, Shopping, I think). Even better is when this happens, it also resets the count on how many container tabs you've opened, so near the end of the day I'll go to shift containers and get blocked by a "Congrats! You've opened 100 container tabs!" that needs to be dismissed.

This has happened to me several times as well. I use them with the temporary container tabs add-on (so, short-lived containers by default, plus a selection of specific sites that I retain information for, with strict cross-domain isolation), and let me tell you, losing that configuration is painful after setting it up.

The fact that you can't sync container configuration between devices is also a huge pain point, when you have a nontrivial setup.

I still use them, but I accept that I'm going to endure some pain now and then; I can't recommend Firefox containers to people who just want to get work done right now.

Really? Is that a known issue? I haven’t experienced that and I’ve been using containers on Firefox since they were introduced.

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