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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.
just use those.
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 while maintaining the ability to track the user's online presence across all platforms .
ftfy
CAPTCHA: truest
Every window should be using a fresh cookie store/indexdb. All tabs on a particular window would share these. Remove ability to strip tabs out into new windows.
No need to explain anything to grandma users etc whats happening. It just works.
perhaps your porn profile is used as your bank's secondary verification
Now I can troll on Slashdot without opening multiple browsers! This will increase my net comment trolling and 'cute animal liking' productivity at least 100%..
Bye!
Great! That will make it much easier to have an argument with myself on /., or boast the score on my own posts.
Won't this feature just be mainly used by astro-turfers to better use their sock-puppet accounts?
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Yes, this sounds really useful. I don't necessarily want all the sites I visit to know all the others.
And it doesn't claim to (this is mentioned in TFA). If privacy and security are concerns, don't consider this feature. It's a great way to help companies to correlate your online identities. With browser finger-printing, it wouldn't be too tricky for them to merge your online activity.
However, what if this were to be extended so that each contextual container allowed it's own settings / plugins / configuration / auto-complete / history data? This would at least make it equivalent to using different browsers with the convenience of sharing a tabbed interface.
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?
multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers
I like having (to use) multiple bowsers for this. It means I can have a different desktop icon for each one. Want to do "general purpose" surfing? use the default. Want to log in to FB? Use a firefox that has a different database, history, cookie location and remembered passwords - not quite a sandbox, but good enough.
And so it goes on. It is quite easy and sounds more straightforward than that stuff about containers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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 would have made tracking you a bit more difficult. They must have finally worked it out with Google and Facebook.
If you want this now, you can have it. Simply have more than one profile, and tell the browser to start with a new instance using the new profile. This lets you make shortcuts / launchers / whatever that can be entirely separate, even if using the same browser.
For instance, I have two launchers for pale moon, one for general browsing, and another for email:
The first is the default with the "-new-instance" flag:
palemoon %u -new-instance
The second specifies a different profile:
palemoon -profile "/home/cfalcon/.moonchild productions/email_only" -new-instance
You can make as many of these as you like, and the action of "making a new profile" is just mkdir, and then point it to the new directory. You can also set a different theme in each profile, allowing you to know at a glance what is what.
Chrome has a similar feature:
google-chrome --profile-directory=(whatever)
And firefox even has a profile manager:
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
The topic of the article is probably a way to make this easier. The method will definitely be less secure to some degree, but as long as they don't remove the existing standard way of doing things, it will improve privacy for people who can't be arsed to set it up the current way.
uMatrix (replacement for Ghostery, AdBlock|uBlock, etc) - blocks by default:
All 3rd party cookies.
All 3rd party scripts.
All iFrames.
I have been using Incognito mode for quite many years mostly because of having to log in to more than one gmail accounts simultaneously. The only thing that I miss is the ability to have them all in one window in different tabs. But on the other hand having different accounts in different windows can be also considered as a feature, as it greatly helps in separating tabs showing data from the same account. It also enables me not have to push that annoying sign in with a different account link, because it always loads a fresh login page as if I have never been to gmail.com before.
Kewl! So, I can, like, flame or troll myself on Slashdot?
Cookies aren't the only way advertisers identify users. What about adding many of the other pieces (UA string, list of extensions, HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, language support, time zone, etc.)?
I'd like to see the browser randomly change as many of these as possible (don't even make them unique to the same session).
See https://panopticlick.eff.org
I think they missed the most important one... Pr0n.
I know the private/incognito mode is for that, but if you gone create default profiles, let's not be prude about it.
Most ad networks use much more than cookies & cache to identify you.
Flash cookies, user agent, screen resolution, installed fonts, plugins, etc.
Here's an open source library to do exactly that:
https://github.com/Valve/finge...
Not true. The statistics include both, desktop and mobile, together. Firefox for desktop is doing fine, better than Chrome. But mobile is another story. Since most websites today are viewed from mobile browsers, it changes stats greatly in favor of browsers included with those platforms.
There is no stats about browser installations, but only website hits.
I'm very happy to see Firefox adding a good feature.
Ever heard of Selfdestructing cookies?
First of all, I completely agree with you about the "veer hard to privacy" idea.
Second, as a user of Phoen^WFirebir^WFirefox since about 0.5, who just lets the thing update instead of trying to customize it extensively (except for installing my favorite extensions, of course), it's been so long since 3.5 that I don't remember what the old UI was like anymore. Could you remind me what was so great about it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why must I go to palemoon to get 64 bit firefox?
Also, the money they get from Yahoo comes at a price. They are driving away casual users who will be annoyed about 5 times by being herded to Yahoo and then switch browsers rather than remove yahoo from their search list ( I don't hate yahoo, but I end up removing any trace of it to avoid getting it accidentally if yahoo is paying for this, then do they realize it's hurting them? )
Having driven away all their casual users, then why not appeal to savvy elites with privacy and other features that give them some advantage over the proles?
...
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.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
And that's the strange thing about this: For the first time in I-don't-know-how-many-years, Mozilla are making a Firefox change that's actually useful, and that (I assume) users will appreciate. What's happening? How did this one slip through?
I always seem to get Mod points on days I don't have anything I really want to give points to.
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.
You have, in effect, described EFF's Privacy Badger addon. It works heuristically to block cookies from leaking from their original domains, except when told otherwise (some exceptions are included by default -- so-called yellowlist, check out "How does Privacy Badger work?" section). I've been using it for some time and seems to work very well with little breakage. Rarely have to whitelist something.
There are a lot of asshat webmasters that design websites that play "stupid webmaster tricks", depending on the user agent they sniff out. I use Pale Moon, a Firefox fork. For updates, it tends to revbump the version # by +0.1 when Firefox increments by +1.0.
Net result is that Pale Moon 26.2 is approximately equivalant to Firefox 39 or 43 or whatever it's at now. Go to an asshat website, and it refuses to let you in, whining about an "out-of-date unsupported browser". Yet if you lie to the website, and change the user agent to Firefox 43, it works just fine. I'm sure this happens with various other browsers, too.
Unfortunately, that strategy is self-defeating. The asshat webmasters look at their access logs, and see more Firefox hits and fewer "other browser" hits, which they then use as an excuse to "block all other browsers because they're only a fraction of a percent".
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
> The only annoying thing is the clickbox that asks if you want to not show
> the profile manager any more that is periliously close to the ok button.
>
> If anyone clicks that, then firefox doesn't show the profilemanager even if
> you tell it to on the command line unless you manually edit the profiles.ini
This works in Pale Moon, and should work in Firefox, too. From the commandline
firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager
will bring up the profile manager dialogue. If it works from the command line it'll also work from a linux bash script in an xterm or a .BAT or .CMD file in a Windows Dos Box. You can even have a "program launcher" launch the appropriate profile. E.g. my Slashdot profile is launched with
palemoon -new-instance -p slashdot
You should be able to create a similar Firefox shortcut on the Windows desktop. I currently have 21 profiles for various forums and tasks. Execute
firefox -help
to see what parameters are available.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Second, as a user of Phoen^WFirebir^WFirefox since about 0.5, who just lets the thing update instead of trying to customize it extensively (except for installing my favorite extensions, of course), it's been so long since 3.5 that I don't remember what the old UI was like anymore. Could you remind me what was so great about it?
- Full theming
- Fully customizable buttons and URLbar
- Status bar that buttons could be moved to
- Bookmarks sidebar
- History sidebar
- Tabs on bottom available
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Precisely the only two things in your list that are actually great, not just visual candy, are I think available in Firefox now:
- Bookmarks sidebar ctrl-b
- History sidebar ctrl-h
Using those all the time.
"How did this one slip through?"
Yes, LMAO too.
So unexpected that I was actually immediately wondering about what hidden corporate interest or developer insanity could be involved this time. Because seeing past experience, it must be something like that, right?
Wow, what an amazingly ignorant comment.
Where do I start?!
I was going to write a long reply, but I don't think anyone is even reading this post any more, so I won't bother wasting my time.
I will however say that Mozilla has contributed more to the open web than any other company!
Secondly, Mozilla is a tiny non-profit (charitable) organisation, mostly volunteers, and yet people have the audacity to complain and compare to a multi-billion dollar spying corp empire like Google?!
Of course, Firefox is the only reason Mozilla ever had any relevance.
erm, Mozilla championed (along with Opera) the development of the latest web standards, including HTML5, CSS3, and especially Javascript (EMCAScript) which Google so heavily rely upon but never give back to the community.
Secondly, they woke up everyone to the evil tactics of Microsoft to make the web into a proprietary standard (same thing Google is now trying to do after ripping-off the code for Apple's Safari). And Mozilla championed and helped to standard the web and raise awareness of W3C as well as Accessibility standards and developing for all browsers, not just Internet Explorer.
With regards to the UI, it was developed after much research and feedback from users and how they use their browser.
Yes, there's many things I don't like about Australis (the new browser UI), so that's why there's a great extension (Classic Theme) to customise the browser to however you want.
Amazing how idiotic some people are and how few brain cells they have... or just amazingly ignorant unable to see past their own nose.
Chill out troll, you're going to have an aneurysm.
caniuse.com is a pretty rubbish place to get stats,
here, go direct to the source instead: http://gs.statcounter.com/
I'd like to remind you, Firefox is a non-profit charitable organisation with a miniscule amount of funding for how much they have contributed to the open web and privacy!
Remember, they championed web standards compliance and the importance of the W3C and accessibility guidelines at a time when Microsoft wanted to make the web into a proprietary model, a bit like what Google is trying to do now.
And now Mozilla along with Opera are the ones who are championing the latest web standards, especially HTML5, CSS3 and 4, and especially Javascript (EMCAScript) upon which the entire web is built.
I shouldn't need to remind you that Google is a multi-billion dollar spying corp empire who's pumped an enormous amount of marketing power into their reskinned Apple Safari (AppleWebKit) rip-off, and you're comparing goliath to david's little baby kid?!
What I also find amazing is that Microsoft were heavily fined for bundling IE into Windows, but when Google advertises their browser all over Google.com (the window to the web for most people), and bundles Chrome into Android OS or their laptop OS, that's perfectly fine!
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Google is one of the biggest bribers... errr, I mean, "lobbyist" to the US Government?
Wake up retard.
Easily fixed using the great Classic Theme Restorer extension, which I've used ever since Australis (new skin) went live.
You need to remember that Mozilla is a non-profit charitable organisation which is a miniscule mouse compared to its competition, especially from one of the world's biggest multi-billion dollar spying corp empire Google (who are coincidentally, the biggest bribers ("lobbyist") to the US Government).
Since no one ever donates to Mozilla, how else are their full-time staff and devs supposed to live in a world run by money?!
But you do make a good last point however, which is that since they can't appeal to the masses like the billions Google spends on Chrome adverts, Mozilla could however go down a different direction. But to be fair to Mozilla, they are trying to become more privacy focused, but again, they can only do so much because that's like going against the hand that feeds them!