groovecoder

It works similarly to Private Browsing Mode - it actually uses the same architecture.

But the Facebook container retains your Facebook cookies (and therefore your login) after restarts.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the add-on mentioned in the story.

I'm also interested in this claim. If you're referring to Intelligent Tracking Prevention, I don't think it does this.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the add-on mentioned in the story.

We tried a few different UXs and none of them felt ideal. We have an open issue to add Messenger to the list of FB domains that are contained. https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/issues/45

Disclosure: I'm the author of the add-on mentioned in the story.

Basically, various privacy protections cause various kinds of website breakage.

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/01/26/improving-privacy-w...

do not skip the section on "Cloudflare, Privacy and k-Anonymity" ... it is a great summary of an elegant privacy solution.

And check out Cloudflare's detail post too:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webappsec/2014De... is a good run-down of referrer uses from the AdSense perspective.

Disclaimer: I'm the Firefox engineer who wrote the patch and the blog post.

I'm very interested in this thread. Other replies here are correct - there are many ways that sites try to detect private browsing, and many ways they can get it right or wrong.

How do people feel about the "stealth" design goal of private browsing? Should it be a goal? What about a hide-in-a-big-crowd tactic? (E.g., how Tor tries to make all its users look identical.)

Disclaimer: I'm the Firefox engineer who wrote the patch and the post.

We did a user research study measuring website breakage under various privacy protections:

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/01/26/improving-privacy-w...

tl;dr - strict-origin-when-cross-origin was one of the protections with the lowest amount of breakage. Entering Private Browsing is a clear, strong signal that the user wants more privacy, so we started by implementing this protection in Private Browsing.

However, note that some advertisers demand that AdTech vendors must not serve their ads on certain kinds of pages. (e.g., https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1348688?hl=en&topi...) Many of those agreements require full referrers to be able to audit the ad inventory.

So there are some concerns and trade-offs to make in this space.

The default user agent policy is no-referrer-when-downgrade, which strips the referrer header going from HTTPS pages to HTTP resources.

Firefox 59 PBM now implements strict-origin-when-cross-origin by default, which trims the path off the referrer value of ALL 3rd-party requests.

Privacy Engineer @ Firefox here ...

Extensions operate on requests before the platform-level channel classifier.

In theory, the platform-level classifier should be faster than the webRequest API, but we've not measured it specifically.

Running both uBO and and Tracking Protection can give some extra coverage; I've noticed sometimes the Tracking Protection shield pops up even though uBO (and Privacy Badger) are running.

It's a Web Extension add-on, so it's written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

There should be a post on hacks.mozila.org soon.

As the user-base grows, we'll likely adopt more settings.

We had some original mock-ups with more settings, but they cluttered the introductory UI and seemed to only confuse people new to the concept.

No, you don't need a Firefox account to use this feature or add-on. The "Multi-Account" describes multiple accounts on websites - not Firefox itself.

Good idea ... file an issue for it? :)

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!

https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-no/firefox/addon/context-plus/ does the first part.

You can also assign the site to the Container in the browserAction pop-up UI.

No. Canvas-fingerprinting is mitigated in other protections; they are not per-Container. :/

If you install the Test Pilot experiment (add-on), you'll be automatically migrated to AMO. We plan to "graduate" the Test Pilot listing soon.

The keyboard shortcut for the browserAction pop-up is ctrl + . and then you should be able to tab down to whichever container you want.

Very good point; and you get a +1 for "DefCon"

I think there's a GitHub issue for it too. Please upvote!

I like where your head is at ... if not your choice of words. Check out https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Tor_Uplift

In fact, "Containers on the Go" seems to do this:

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

We love getting issues on our GitHub repo:

https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot-containers

And we're asking folks to upvote their favorite issues, so we can point more add-on developers at these lists. Since we can't solve for every workflow and use-case, we really want to enable an ecosystem of container-aware addons. (Some of the other comments here link to the already-growing number of container-aware addons)

And check out https://developer.mozilla.org/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/cont... if you're interested in making your own.

Check out https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec... for the details of what is - and isn't - separated between Containers.

The add-on flips the config setting, but also:

1. Implements the browserAction pop-up UI for managing containers & tabs 2. Adds the ability to assign sites to always open in a certain container

Sounds kinda like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288858 ?

Or maybe a new bug in the [META] Contextual Identity / Containers Bugs ? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=11914...)

As a Firefox engineer, then, let me say props for being ahead of your time! (And waaaaay ahead of mine - I'm new to PrivSec engineering at Firefox)

I'm not sure if Cookiepie directly inspired the engineers who built originAttributes and Containers features here, but after working with this Firefox team I can definitely say that the core Containers tech is not hackish at all - great engineers here.

Anyway, thanks for contributing!

This is a lighter-weight approach. It's per-tab so it doesn't require a whole other Firefox process to run.