Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by konradkpl 1759 days ago
Firefox Containers is a great feature that deserves more credits. This feature allows us to avoid tracking, while at the same time ensuring the convenience of use and does not require the user to change their habits. Do you want to limit facebook? Create the container, set the default facebook.com opening in it, and use the browser as before. This should be a standard feature in any browser.
1 comments

Not a container user so I hope you don't mind me asking, how is this different to opening facebook in new private tab/window? Is the convenience in the act of automatically opening it in container if you type in facebook.com or follow a link to it?
what you mention is one advantage, another example is that you are not limited to 2 contexts (private tab & non-private tab vs as many containers as you need).

Related to the advantage you mention is also the reverse: clicking a non-facebook link from the facebook container can (if you want) open a non-facebook container

Ok starting to understand it. Seems like something I would have a hard time explaining to a non-tech person.
yes, you could describe that use case as "quarantining" websites in short, but I'd say it's a power user feature if managed manually.

If you install the "facebook container" extension, it's zero conf but it's only for facebook.

Another use case I saw users being interested in, is you have 2 (or more) accounts on a website and you can login in both at the same time in 2 separate containers (you cannot quarantine the website to the container in this use case because you need to open it in multiple containers). You can do that with incognito, but the second one is very temporary as closing the browser is going to log you out.

So compared to a private tab, you basically get persistence and some form of organization (containers also act as groups).

How important is to have tabs from different containers in the same window?

I don't find it particularly important, but that's also a difference with incognito