Containers Come to Firefox Test Pilot

I do find the name – &quot;containers&quot; – a bit confusing. &quot;Contextual identities&quot; would seem like a better fit, because that&#x27;s what it will be used for.<p>I am reading this name also on other places, surprised Mozilla sticked with &quot;containers&quot;:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;tanvi&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;contextual-identities-on-the-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;tanvi&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;contextual-identit...</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Contextual_Identity_Project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Contextual_Identity_Projec...</a><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Contextual_Identity_Project&#x2F;Containers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Contextual_Identity_Projec...</a>

Containers are great. I&#x27;ve been using them for a bit. They definitely need a few things. Like an ability for the &quot;new tab&quot; to be sticky (if I&#x27;m in a container - new tab should open in the same container), and the ability to pick which container to open things in when the OS triggers the browser to open a URL. Right now it&#x27;s very leaky... Say I start a registration process for a site in a container, they send a email confirmation, I click the link and it opens outside of the container, leaking the cookies. Bad for OPSEC.

The UI&#x2F;UX for container tabs will be a difficult design challenge. How do you explain to typical users what a contextual identity is and why&#x2F;when they might want to use one?<p>I think per-window contextual identities, instead of per-tab, might be a good mental model. It&#x27;s easy to explain to users that tabs in different windows can&#x27;t see the same cookies. This is a generalization of Private Browsing window&#x27;s throwaway context identities today. It&#x27;s harder to explain that some tabs in the window are in the &quot;Shopping&quot; container and others in the &quot;Personal&quot; container.

Amazing. These types of changes are a step in the right for direction for Mozilla. I abandoned Firefox long ago for Chrome but now with containers, e10s, and Electrolysis I&#x27;m planning on moving back.

This seems like a reimplementation of Profiles, that you can use with `firefox -P`.<p>The main issue here is one of UI. If you click a link in a PDF, what profile should the link be opened in? My take is that if you have multiple firefox instances it should ask you, otherwise it should just open on the only one open.

Can&#x27;t wait to say &quot;Eat that gmail&quot; (for annoyingly logging me into every other google property).

I really love this. Will be a very easy way to keep gmail, aws accounts etc separate. Awesome idea. No more temp incognito tabs!!!

Is autocomplete also handled per container? There&#x27;s an awful lot of privacy sensitive info that can be gleaned from there but it&#x27;s not listed as being covered.

IMO it would be awesome if we could configure a few privacy-related settings per container. For example, enabling first-party isolation for Shopping would be great. And creating a container that forgets cookies after a very short timeout (kind of like private browsing) would be nice, too.

The section &quot;How does the Test Pilot experiment differ from Containers in Nightly?&quot; isn&#x27;t really clear. It doesn&#x27;t explain what Nightly (and Developer Edition) users should expect to what they use (if they&#x27;re not willing to jump to Test Pilot).<p>Are container tabs are being moved out of the browser core to the Test Pilot walled-garden extension store? Or Test Pilot extension is just enabler and all the stuff is still in the core? Or core is becoming chromeless&#x2F;API-only and extension does the UI? Or both systems are going to be developed in parallel (or maybe Test Pilot is fast-ring and built-in stuff is a snapshot of whatever looks stable at relase time)? Or is it something else?

Is there any chance those could be synced with KDE Plasma&#x27;s Activities (which implements a quite similar concept on the DE level)?<p>The biggest issue with using Activities has always been that browsers know nothing about them, so when clicking a link in any application, it was opened in the most recently active browser window - no matter which activity it was on.<p>So ideally there&#x27;d be a way to have Firefox simply inherit KDE Plasma&#x27;s Activities as Containers, so one wouldn&#x27;t have to maintain and somehow map Activities&#x2F;Containers for both at the same time.

People interested in this may also like this add-on, which I&#x27;ve been using for years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;private-tab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;private-tab&#x2F;</a><p>It lets you open private tabs in the same window as regular tabs.

How is this different from Profiles?

From the post:<p>&gt; <i>How will users know what context they are operating in?</i><p>I find that themes are great for knowing what context I&#x27;m in, like the Totem mechanism in Inception. I&#x27;m not sure if we can have a different theme for each container though.

i love this brilliant idea, i have always needed something like this and as substitute i&#x27;ve been using two browsers.