Slashdot Mirror
Experimental Firefox Feature Lets You Use Multiple Identities While Surfing the Web (techcrunch.com)
Firefox web browser has a new experimental feature that allows a user to segregate their online identities and sign in into multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers. From a TechCrunch report: This new "container tab" feature, which is now available in the unstable Nightly Firefox release channel, provides you with four default identities (personal, work, shopping, and banking) with their own stores for cookies, IndexedDB data store, local storage and caches. In practice, this means you can surf Amazon without ads for products you may have looked at following you around the web when you switch over to your work persona. As the Firefox team notes, the idea behind this feature isn't new, but nobody has figured out how to best present this new tool to users.
Cookies, etc., should never be able to see each other without permission. Let's hope this trend continues.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
It's no secret that Firefox's market share has dropped to almost nothing. The latest browser market share stats show Firefox at maybe 6% to 7% of the market. That's well below desktop Chrome and Chrome for Android, even when both are considered separately. Firefox, across all versions and all platforms, is used only about as much as Opera Mini, or individual versions of browsers like IE 11 and Safari for iOS 9.3.
Of course, Firefox is the only reason Mozilla ever had any relevance.
Yet it's like the Firefox devs have done everything they can to drive away Firefox users. They've forced many unwanted UI changes on Firefox users, while also not improving the performance of Firefox. Hell, they even embedded ads into Firefox itself at one point! As Firefox has tried to poorly imitate Chrome, more and more Firefox users have moved to other browsers. After all, if you're going to get a shitty Chrome-like experience when using Firefox, you might as well just use real Chrome and at least get a shitty experience that's fast and doesn't use as much memory!
The only way I think that Firefox could possibly redeem itself is if the UI was reverted back to a usable state (we're talking Firefox 3.5), and the focus veered hard to privacy. Firefox's salvation could come from providing users the most secure and private browsing experience possible. It should become their main focus.
I don't think they'll ever manage to, say, make a browser that's more lightweight and faster than Chrome. So they might as well at least focus on something they could potentially do, which is make Firefox as impregnable as possible to the online tracking that happens today.