Google Container for Firefox – Prevent Google from tracking you around the web

I think, and always thought of it as intuitive with the way I use browsers, that sessions should work as a tree. So only child tabs in that tree should see the contents of parent's session. If I open a new tab, it's a new tree. Bookmarks could create permanent root node.

Containers are a feature built into Firefox. There are extensions that let you use them more generally with any given website. It&#x27;s also quite useful to log into websites with multiple accounts at the same time.<p>However, to prevent tracking I mostly use CookieAutoDelete [0] which only stores Cookies for sites that I have whitelisted after the tab is closed. It&#x27;s really just a handful of sites I visit frequently and don&#x27;t want to log in every time. Cookies aren&#x27;t required for anything else.<p>Also, not having a Google account comes in handy to prevent tracking by Google. My default search engine is DuckDuckGo.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;de&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;cookie-autodelete&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;de&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;cookie-autodelet...</a>

I prefer this setup:<p>- install Cookie Auto-Delete (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;cookie-autodelete&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;cookie-autode...</a>)<p>- set it to delete all local data for all domains, 15 seconds after its last tab is closed<p>- create a Firefox container for untrusted apps you can&#x27;t get rid of (e.g Gmail, Facebook) and set these domains to open in this &quot;untrusted&quot; container by default<p>- set Cookie Auto-Delete not to delete the data for this particular container<p>- whitelist the few domains you trust so that you can keep their sessions open in the Default container<p>Result: No need to use a secondary browser or to install special &quot;Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;etc Containers for Firefox&quot;. You always browse the Web incognito by default! Only when you visit some particular webpages do you enter a custom container that keep your personal data separate from other activities.<p>This has worked nicely for 2+ years, with other essential extensions such as uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes.

This is probably a good idea in theory. In practice, it might lower your internal ReCAPTCHA score and end up prompting you more actual CAPTCHAs, possibly up to unsolvable[1] ones.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US9407661" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US9407661</a>

Isn&#x27;t it possible to have a &quot;per TLD&quot; container addon? I&#x27;m fine to be logged into Google and even have Google collect information when I&#x27;m using any of their services (same for Facebook). What I&#x27;m really after is a way to sandbox every site to only have information I explicitly grant it while using their service.

In order to use this supposed privacy-enhancing feature, you must allow the authors of this extension total control over everything you do on the web. Add-ons are automatically updated in Firefox by default, so you can review this code now and it will change later. This seems like a poor trade.

I found using this, with an isolation setting for specific domains, to be a better option:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;temporary-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;temporary-con...</a><p>An isolation policy will let you treat subdomain different from main domain. So I can use mail.google.com and still always be logged in, while a search from address bar or elsewhere will open in a temporary container that lasts only as long as the browser tab.<p>The persistent &quot;Google&quot; container I have has domains mail.google.com, accounts.google.com, and myaccount.google.com.. everything else loads in temporary containers.<p>Combine with this to remove the link stubs on SERP so you&#x27;re not sending back click data if there&#x27;s a shadow profile based on IP and browser metrics.. so shadow profile only knows what you searched and not necessarily what you clicked, and its cleaner for container assignment when opening links in new tabs because there&#x27;s no brief hop to the same temp container google search loads in before going on to a separate temporary container for the target site:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;google-search-link-fix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;google-search...</a>

not sure why you&#x27;d use this over the Multi-Account Containers addon by Mozilla.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a>

This is a cool idea for an add-on, I use the Multi-Account Containers add on along with Cookie AutoDelete to do basically the same thing for a number of sites: Google, Facebook, twitter, linkedin (rot in hell, linkedin), amazon, etc. I like having my cookies there so I don&#x27;t have to log in every time, but also don&#x27;t want to be tracked around the web.<p>This looks like a great way to help people who don&#x27;t want to fiddle with settings to get the same sort of protection. It&#x27;d be nice if Multi-Account Containers had an option to add these sites. I should cut a PR for that, probably :\

I definitely want this, but the only reason I use Facebook Container is because it&#x27;s an official Mozilla addon. I encouraged Mozilla to pursue a Google version, but it seems like they&#x27;ve declined for now, and were just looking to capitalize on the press wave about Facebook.

How can I be sure that with all these tools I have really avoided tracking?<p>I have PiHole&#x2F;VPN&#x2F;privacy browser extensions installed. Javascript is disabled for the majority of the sites. LittleSnitch supposedly takes care of the chatty non-browser programs. All my 3G&#x2F;4G data goes through PiHole. I have only a selected few apps installed on my phone.<p>Paranoia? Yes. Do I have the piece of mind? No. I just simply cannot stay 24&#x2F;7 on Wireshark examininig every outgoing packet.<p>Unless the legislation changes for good I really don&#x27;t see how this mess can be tackled.

For everyone not knowing why you would use this extension, it is so the container breaks after Google. Say you Google spaghetti, after you click you defined food.com to be a food container, with this extension it will break out of Google container into food container. It is pretty great except it creates two tabs for me and breaks history. If that could be fixed or would be flawless.

Does anyone have input on whether Perflyst, the author of this addon, is trustworthy?

I&#x27;m probably in a minority around these here parts but... Am I the only one who doesn&#x27;t worry too much about all this &quot;tracking&quot;?<p>Trying to avoid tracking is like some weird obsession&#x2F;hobby. You go to all these lengths and then you realise they were tracking you anyway, so you throw your arms up in disgust, exclaiming how evil they are and start trying to block that vector, soon enough rinse and repeat. I was there too only a few years ago but I&#x27;ve since given up and my life has gotten measurably better because of it - I no longer feel like I&#x27;m trying to &quot;stick it to the man&quot;, I don&#x27;t have to integrate a bunch of different services in an attempt to keep x and y in separate products to reduce my &quot;awareness surface area&quot; to any one company. I just stopped worrying so much. Simple as that. And I&#x27;m really not convinced some evil affliction is going to strike me down as a result. Next time you find yourself wasting hours of your time trying to make yourself &quot;private&quot; just think of all the other fun stuff you could be doing.<p>But if you want best bang for minute spent worrying privacy: Use Incognito, uBlock, Proton Mail and a VPN. 20 minutes of your life and you&#x27;re pretty darn private. This should cover you without labouring over choices of extensions etc.

I&#x27;m not sure an addon per tracker is web scale.

Still not sure whether, and why, these containers are needed when Firefox&#x27;s internal ‘tracking protection’ is enabled.

Better yet: use uBlock origin in advanced mode (dynamic filtering) and block 3rd party frames and scripts by default.

Can somebody tdlr everybody why this is needed in addition to the official container extension?

If I keep my whole Google (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com</a>) and Youtube history completely empty but still logged in to Google account everyday (gmail and youtube on Firefox), are they still tracking me around the web?

This is cool, will install. Maybe Firefox embraces this idea and adopts the fork.

This is cool but I don&#x27;t think I will be using it. I already use Searchonymous[1] to prevent Google from tracking my web searches while also browsing YouTube in a separate container where I&#x27;m not signed in.<p>I really on Google&#x27;s sign-in mechanism for many websites and this would probably interfere with that.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;searchonymous&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;searchonymous...</a>

It seems to not be working well. I&#x27;ve already have the Firefox Multi-Account Containers [1] extension, but I wanted to try this extension. The problem is that it has some conflicts, and now after uninstalling it I can&#x27;t open any *google.com domains, it crashes and closes the tab.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a>

They still fingerprint your browser. I hope there are better protections against that but also,things like mobile device details in user agents would no longer be sent to the server.

How does this compare to extensions like uBlock Origin and Ghostery?

Bug warning: this is a neat container helper, but it will break your <i>Back</i> button when clicking on Google searches.<p>Relevant addon issue: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;containers-everywhere&#x2F;contain-google&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;containers-everywhere&#x2F;contain-google&#x2F;issu...</a>

I switched to using Private Browsing windows and tabs, which clears all tracking cookies on close. And browse via always-on VPN to hide my IP. Much safer, imho.<p>Still unresolved are history leaks via Referer, from things like fonts, ajax, tagmanager google.com API calls, present on all websites.<p>Why web people link so much Google stuff in their websites is a mystery.

1. use google.ca as default search engine<p>2. disable cookie &amp; javascript for *.google.ca<p>3. disable all google ads &amp; analytics domains.

I&#x27;ve tried this tool and had to remove it after a few weeks as the continuity breaks when clicking links on google results.<p>Its just too annoying having to re-google something you search for after clicking the first result and losing your history.

Why not just have container for every damn site. No one should track me

Disconnect can block Facebook, Google and twitter

Would be nice to have social network container, rather than having individual google, facebook container.

Question:<p>I have 0 knowledge of the web and whatnot..<p>I already have privacy badger, would this also help? or would it make no difference?

Could really do with one of these for pornhub and such sites.

What does this add over Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin?

Thanks this will be very useful.

just facebook.com for Facebook production<p>With google, i use &quot;Always Open in this Container&quot; each google service, this better for Container google service

Facebook too

Incredible!

Too bad I don&#x27;t use firefox xD