Firefox Containers Allow You to Browse with Separate Personas

When it comes to browsers, you don't see as many truly innovative features arrive as often they did years ago. Mozilla, however, has a new idea that it is testing with the Firefox browser that does qualify as innovative.

A new Containers Feature in Firefox lets users browse with separate personas. Here are the details.

Containers is an experimental feature in Firefox that caters to the idea that as we browse the web we take on different personas, such as shopper, reader, communicator, etc.

Mozilla security engineer Tanvi Vyas writes that the feature will allow "users to log in to multiple accounts on the same site simultaneously and gives users the ability to segregate site data for improved privacy and security." He adds the following:

"We all portray different characteristics of ourselves in different situations. The way I speak with my son is much different than the way I communicate with my coworkers. The things I tell my friends are different than what I tell my parents. I’m much more guarded when withdrawing money from the bank than I am when shopping at the grocery store."

"With Containers, users can open tabs in multiple different contexts – Personal, Work, Banking, and Shopping.  Each context has a fully segregated cookie jar, meaning that the cookies, indexeddb, localStorage, and cache that sites have access to in the Work Container are completely different than they are in the Personal Container. That means that the user can login to their work twitter account on twitter.com in their Work Container and also login to their personal twitter on twitter.com in their Personal Container. The user can use both mail accounts in side-by-side tabs simultaneously. The user won’t need to use multiple browsers, an account switcher, or constantly log in and out to switch between accounts on the same domain."

"The Containers implementation in Nightly Firefox is a basic implementation that allows the user to manage identities with a minimal user interface."

Mozilla also has a FAQ on the new feature, found here (scroll down). It sounds useful, worth a try.