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Comment by maciekmm | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug. I made the ContainerTabsSidebar firefox addon[0], which is inspired by the TST. It groups tabs based on firefox privacy containers, which means every container has an isolated cookie store. I'm a tab hoarder and developed it to work for such "use-case".

It's very similar to the groups presented, but displays tabs vertically.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tab...

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Very cool. I use Container Tabs so I can be logged into multiple AWS accounts simultaneously and this will be cool because they're sort of contexts. I wish I could see whole-desktop contexts but I'll settle for this.

I'm going to try out your thing.

How does your extension interact with Temporary Containers (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...)?

I am a tab hoarder too and I use Temporary Containers to create ephemeral sessions.

It's currently not the best experience as the temporary containers addon creates a container per browser tab which bloats the sidebar.

But there's a github issue for it and I've received a couple of requests regarding this today, so I will tackle this ASAP.

Great to hear. Thanks much!

I use temporary containers and I installed your add-on. I just checked the box that removes empty containers and it works great!

Your extension has already changed my life and I only installed it last night.

Thank you!

Hi! Support for Temporary Containers has just been released.

Is there any other restriction/benefit in containers? I use the 'first party isolate' config option, and never really need e.g. different accounts logged in to same site, so as far as I'm aware there's no point?

I recently switched from an unmaintained tabs sidebar to 'Sidebery' which is quite nice in an 'overriding UI like it's made by Adobe' sort of way, which has got me using trees, and even tried containers (since unlike previous one it supports changing them and shows a coloured dot for which a tab is in) but I don't think it's gaining me anything.

With the first party isolate, mechanisms such as oAuth would not work. So the containers are less restrictive, but still allow you to have two sites with the same cookie context.

I've been using first party isolation for quite a while on desktop and Android and the only websites I experienced issues with are the Atlassian login and the Trello GitHub powerup.

Everything else, including tons of single sign in/OAuth websites, work without any issue.

Yep, ditto Atlassian. There's a big thread of people complaining about it on their forums too.

Unfortunately of course it'll always be a minority, and won't affect whether even those people (have to) use Jira or whatever, so not really any incentive for Atlassian to fix it.

Thank you for this - just what I needed! Tree-style tabs always seemed like a bunch of tabs thrown together with no organization, but your extension gives it the context that the user explicitly defined in the form of containers. I use multi-account containers a lot and this extension is just the supplement that was needed. Plus, being able to switch between container-tab view, bookmarks, and history is just the right thing to have.

I like this because it organizes my tabs in the same way I do mentally... however it doesn't actually reorder my tabs. What I mean is, Ctrl+Tab surfing through my tabs doesn't iterate the list as it is displayed sequentially.

I recommend the Multi-Account Containers extension by Mozilla, which has a "sort tabs" button that accomplishes what you want.

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

I am not sure why this functionality is a separate extension - this is a bit confusing - but it's working for me.

I'm using Multi-Account Containers, I never paid attention to the Sort Tabs button. This is great! I'm looking for a keyboard shortcut for it now.

I am planning to add automatic tab sorting to the plugin. There's a github issue for this exact problem. I just didn't have time to implement this feature. ;)

I'm probably missing something obvious, but I see in your review comments that I'm supposed to be able to add custom container names in the options... but I'm not finding them. Do I have to add through CSS?

Oh man this looks great. Going to give it a try today. I can’t live without containers at this point. So much better than multiple Chrome profiles.

One of my gripes with Firefox containers are that I still can't search for tabs across containers in the awesome bar using the % char

Is it possible to have the hierarchical structure of tabs like in tree style tabs (so I can see which tab spawned which tabs)?

It's not. But please make an issue on github[0] and if there's enough demand I will think about implementing this :) Contributions are also welcome, though the codebase currently needs a bit of a refactor.

[0]:https://github.com/maciekmm/container-tabs-sidebar

This feels like tabs are becoming bookmarks

Tabs are bookmarks that can keep their state. Normal bookmarks have only the URL, and any parameters that go in the URL, but discard the rest, like your position on the page, your navigation history, or what you are doing in a PWA.

Tabs don't discard data, bookmarks do. Sometimes you just want the landing page and a bookmark is fine, other times you want the extra data and a long-lived tab is needed.

Many tabs refresh after no activity

Look at the new Firefox Preview on Android. They're embraced that way.

Tabs and bookmarks still feel pretty different. To update a tab, you activate the tab and then click links as usual. To update a bookmark, you activate the bookmark, click links, delete the old bookmark, create a new bookmark, and drag the new bookmark to the old one's location in the bookmark list (unless I've missed a shortcut here). Tabs feel very dynamic and are useful as a list or queue of work-in-progress, and bookmarks feel very static and are useful as a permanent list of important resources.

I just downloaded this extension and it's fantastic. Thank you :)

Shameless plug, but Vivaldi does this and so much more natively...since beta however many years ago. Haven't touched firefox since.

I'm not aware of Vivaldi having functionality similar to Firefox containers. Please elaborate.

Vivaldi Profiles. Only difference is that in Vivaldi each Profile use separate window (as far as I know).

I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as Chrome's profiles functionality. I tried it out for a week, but it's not quite as robust as Firefox container tabs.

When I need Chromium, I use Brave.

Yeah, Brave is new Chrome.

But Vivaldi is just another Chromium skin. Chromium skins give too much power to Google.

The entire Web standards should not be regulated by just one company.

I will stay with Firefox.

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