So I’ve been using Firefox’s container function for a while now and recently discovered the multi account container extension. What does this add over the built in containers? I’ve seen a lot of people say they need multi account containers but are disappointed that it’s an extension so I’m curious what it adds.
What do you mean “built-in containers”? AFAIK, there’s no way to interact with the built-in containers without an extension to expose it. That was at least true when it launched (e.g. the Facebook container extension was awesome), and I’ve been using the multi-account containers extension ever since.
Here’s how I use it:
- no container - no logins at all
- “personal” - my email and related things
- “work” - work email and related things
- “shopping” - online stores
- “financial” - banking and investments
And so on. Each group has limited access to cookies to scrape. I also have accounts at the same service in different containers and can have them side-by-side.
If this is now built-in, awesome! But I was under the impression that you need some form of extension to access it.
I don’t have nay extension installed that interacts with containers. In settings I enabled container tabs under general and if I right click on the new tab button I can open a container tab, so it appears to be built in. I can also create custom containers for example I have one for google services. So if I understand you correctly the extension doesn’t do anything else special?
Ok, I did some digging and I think I figured out the difference. The multi-account containers add-on adds the following:
- always open in container option - and sync-ing settings across devices
- integration with VPN
- UI for managing them in the extension button area
The first one is the major feature for me since I use it on my work laptop, personal laptop, and desktop, and having the “always open” setting sync across devices has value. I don’t use the VPN feature, but I think you can set certain containers to always use a certain VPN configuration.
I just always used the add-on from the start because I thought there wasn’t a UI for it.
There is no container option in new Firefox profile. It appears only after when you’ve installed Multi container extension. Firefox from Arch Linux repo.
Ah, makes a ton of sense. I guess I assumed OP was a new user or something, but it seems they used the extension in the past.
I can confirm, I just created a new profile and there is no Container option anywhere. Thanks!
It is there on a new profile in the fedora package. Maybe something fedora enables?
That can be possible. I remember seeing the option in a clean profile while using Ubuntu.
I don’t see it on a new profile on macOS, so yeah, it’s probably something Fedora is doing.
@RmDebArc_5 I love containers, that’s one of Firefox’s strong points IMHO, I use it *a lot*. My main complaint is that it doesn’t handle domains, which is a pain for example with Medium.com, Google.com etc. websites, you have to manually add them all 😓
FWIW I recently stopped using the extension due to large resource usage - especially painful if you have many tabs open and FF opens many processes for each container tab, eating up more RAM. I just use FF Nightly for personal stuff and regular FF for work.
I removed the Facebook account containers extension recently, and it seemed it also removed the multi-account containers extension? I still had containers and could use them however, but I discovered something was up when I could no longer use the
ctrl+.shortcut to choose a new container tab.
