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.

Comments

Why only 4?

[Okian Warrior]

I'm not a usability expert by any means, so can anyone tell me why only four identities?

That seems pretty limiting to me, it should be the end user's choice how many identities to use.

Why not something simple like each *window* have separate data that's shared between tabs? Then you don't have any UI changes or usability problems.

Or is "it just works" an Apple patent or something?

Re: Firefox profiles

[ArmoredDragon]

Why not just have a per-site identity? In other words, tracking cookies become worthless because they can't follow you from site to site. And then within each site, allow multiple identities if desired (think private browsing, only data is retained if you desire it.)

Before Profiles

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Before FireFox had profiles, there was the MultiFox add-on. I used it. I liked it. It was easy to use. Unfortunately, Mozilla made a change that made it impossible for MultiFox to work, claiming the functionality was more properly implemented inside FireFox than as an add-on.

Unfortunately, it's taken far too long for Mozilla to do it.