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Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work. Even on AMO, there’s now a bunch of site-specific container addons (Facebook container, Twitter container, Google container, etc) which clearly isn’t scalable.

A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a first-class feature in Firefox.

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Have you tried the Temporary Containers[0] add-on? It has an “Automatic Mode” that makes links open into fresh containers by default. Then you can create rules to dial that back as needed for usability.

I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal” “LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default.

The main challenges are:

1) I have complex rules defining a whitelist on Temporary Containers. I have to sync this manually with setting import/export because Firefox Sync doesn’t handle this for you

2) Multi-Account Containers doesn’t expose its settings AT ALL, so I’m constantly hitting unnecessary “always open site.com in Personal container?” modals.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

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

I was using "Containers on the Go" until recently, I'll try this out, thank you!

Temporary Containers is almost perfect, except when you create a new tab it takes a split second for that tab to be assigned a new temporary container. For that split moment, if you're typing in an address whatever you've typed in so far will be erased when the new tab is switched to the temporary container. On my underpowered machine, this usually means one or two keys are dropped, such that if i was typing in "google" immediately after creating a new tab, the effect is as if I typed "ogle".

Perhaps on faster hardware, the switch to the temporary container happens faster than you can begin typing.

Interesting. I haven’t noticed any performance impact. I’m using it on fairly beefy general-purpose machines though.

Maybe you could work around this by using separate search and address bars? Then you can search before tab and container creation happens. Not gonna help for standard direct navigation though.

It most often bites me when I'm in a new tab and I'm trying to complete a site URL from history. AFAIK there is no other clean way to open a new tab of a site you've been to before. Maybe if the history sidebar were useful, but using that is a PITA for me because I'm already using the Tree Style Tabs sidebar (which is really a feature that should be implemented in firefox itself..)

>If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work.

Also it's hard to export them... it's my understanding they don't travel with sync, you have to manually set them up on each machine.

I have a pretty complex setup, so that frustrates me.

I agree they need a bit more polish. But to be fair, they are also more powerful than in Chrome. You can e.g. request that every subdomain opens in a new temporary container. That's really good isolation.

Also there are semi-bugs. Sometimes opening urls linked to containers put the tabs in weird places, and sometimes.. I think I lost the tabs, if that makes sense.

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