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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

> And I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs, nor browser that allows the same with tabs.

firefox supports this with the tab container extension

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> And I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs, nor browser that allows the same with tabs

I'm probably missing something, but Microsoft makes it reasonably easy to switch from personal account to work account _even with the same email address_ -- in Microsoft Edge in the same profile, in the mobile Outlook & OneDrive apps, and so forth.

Sure it could be better, but the simple workaround is to just create a browser profile (which is pretty easy to do in Chrome and indeed in Edge) per family member, set up distinctive themes for each profile, and so on.

Of course this is also possible with Firefox.

I don’t even want to risk my personal account getting mixed up with my work account. I keep those things absolutely separated.

I try to stick to Firefox for most things and wish they would make this even more intuitive for non-developers. It’d be great if my friends and family could easily toggle between profiles but I don’t want to teach them to type

about:profiles

in the address bar to find those.

Multi-Account Containers is the extension you're looking for. It provides the UI to the feature and it works very well.

Multi-Account Containers is not a frontend for multiple Firefox Profiles. It's a new and separate feature.

+1 on this. My life got a lot better and easier when I started using FF container extension. I can now have one container for my test accounts, another container for my prod, one for my DND gaming accounts, personal SocMedia. It's flipping great. I recommend anyone looking at this trying it out.

I find the workflow for switching to a new container awkward.

I would really appreciate it if you could maybe share your workflow for using containers.

Not GP but I use containers a lot. I have 3 profiles: default, work, and (OSS project shared accounts). It helps a lot if you have sites that are only-one-container. For example, I never open Google Analytics in my default or OSS container, so that one can get defaulted to my "work" container. For sites that you need to open in multiple containers frequently, it's a bit more cumbersome, but there's secondary addons that you can use to add hotkeys, just search "container hotkeys" or something and pick what you like.

Then beyond that there's just a lot of "reopen this site in...."

Also sometimes I just leave certain tabs open for days at a time that are in the right containers, so that helps a lot too.

So I felt that way for a while then I realized the trick was configuring the Extension Shortcuts for Multi-Account Containers.

I use Ctrl+Alt+J to open up my first container, Ctrl+Alt+H for second container, etc. Once I did that it became very easy to open up a container seamlessly and I started getting more mileage out of containers.

As a disclaimer I also consider it a workflow failure if I have to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse so YMMV.

I also have mapped CapsLock to Ctrl.

EDIT:

Forgot to mention the containers I have are - Work - Work Test Users - Work Admin Accounts - Personal - School - Professional Social Media - Online Gaming

I have been using containers for a long time. I use temporary containers for most things, so that tracking isn't an issue. If I have an account that is easy to login to (HN, say) I just use a temporary container and login through my password manager. If it is harder to login to, google say, I create a separate permanent container, name it Google, and use that.

Based on the fact that I now have the worst ad suggestions in Facebook of all the people I know (yes, we discuss this subject) I am pretty sure this works.

I would rather recommend you test the profile switching option:

1. Change the shortcut from firefox.exe to "firefox.exe" -ProfileManager

2. Uncheck the "use the selected profile without asking at startup"

3. Create as many profiles you want. And these will be really containerized, not like the simili container tab feature.

Or multiple profiles.

For email, I used multiple instances of Mozilla Thunderbird with multiple profiles. The existence of the multi-profile capability is not well advertised and not user friendly, as I need to create desktop shortcut with command-line arguments. But it works: i now have two different office 365 ID and they don't step of each other's toes.

(Yes, they do need to be completely separate processes. Tab would not work. OTOH, I find it soothingly reassuring hat they are separate processes. I feel the risk of the program have a subtle bug and starting to mix the two ID much, much lower in this way. It would need to be quite a severe bug.)

I did set each Thunderbird profile to use a different theme so that I can try to avoid confusing them.

But Teams does not support Firefox.

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