I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it's one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven't had any issues so far, glad I did
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
I love FF and use it daily. But honestly, the "some random tab has runaway javascript" is as much of a problem on FF as it is on Chrome. If you leave a JS-heavy site open long enough, sooner or later you'll have some runaway JS come and bite you in the battery. The only complete solution I've got is... to turn it off and back on again. The entire browser, not just the offending tab.
"Currently, add-on sync leaves setting synchronization to the individual add-on. If an add-on has support for syncing settings, they will be synced. If not, they won't. For now, if an add-on doesn't preserve settings during Sync, you should contact the add-on's author and request Sync support."
On the other hand Firefox actually lets you move your profile folder from one computer to another without throwing up a panic flag and resetting everything.
Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven't looked back.
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
Does anyone know an extension or option in containers to preserve your browsing trajectory between containers?
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
I don't understand how it's better than multiple profiles. I use multiple accounts for the same services (Asana, AWS, email, etc.) how can I manage that with containers?
In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating "who I am." Whether that's my personal life and my professional life, or if it's me or my spouse using the same computer.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
You can definitely have two profiles open simultaneously - on MacOS, this is achieved with “open -n Firefox.app --args -P [profile name]”; on Windows, “firefox -no-remote -P [profile name]”. Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow, but at least it means you can wrap up the command in a handy desktop shortcut (e.g. one that says “my Firefox” and one that says “her Firefox”).
> Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow
Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want.
Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago.
Be aware that running multiple profiles at once can cause issues with updates. One instance can end up updating, which means that the other instance can no longer create new processes, because it is still on the old version, and it gets updated in place.
OK - I hadn't come across that. I actually have the shortcut on my desktop that prompts you to pick a profile if you don't have any windows open already. I'll have to see if I can tweak the shortcuts to open each one! Thanks!!
Containers helps keep things sandboxed and lets you use the same window with different tabs representing different sessions.
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
Firefox developers even make a specific Facebook Container add on that I recommend and use.
Instead of you needing to know all the tricks and tweaks needed to make it work well, they're in the box.
I don't even know it's there until it does something unexpected but necessary. For example the Facebook Container has no idea I pay YouTube not to show adverts. So inside Facebook any inlined YouTube video has adverts. If I follow a link to YouTube, I appear outside the Container and have no adverts but don't get followed by Facebook (they'd need YouTube to co-operate)
Yes. As pointed out in another thread, containers share history. But they don't share cookies or session status so you can have multiple gmail sessions going.
Having a container is nice compared to opening a private window because you don't have to do 2FA every time.
LOL, I'll sometimes just use different channel versions of browsers for different accounts when I have to access them regularly. The worst imho is when you have a google personal account and a google business (apps) account for work.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
>I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage
I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
