Multi-Account Containers

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  • Creator: Mkll
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Multi Account Containers is an add-on that lets you separate your work, shopping or personal browsing without having to clear your history, log in and out, or use multiple browsers.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers was first introduced as "Containers" available only in Firefox Nightly. It went on to be a Test Pilot Experiment, where we improved the user experience and added new features. Now it is a Firefox add-on. Which you can download here.

Container tabs are like normal tabs except the sites you visit will have access to a separate slice of the browser's storage. This means your site preferences, logged in sessions, and advertising tracking data won't carry over to the new container. Likewise, any browsing you do within the new container will not affect your logged in sessions, or tracking data of your other containers.

What you can do with Multi Account Containers

  1. Log in to multiple accounts on a single website at the same time. For example, if you have a personal Gmail account and a work Gmail account, you can log in to both accounts in separate containers.
  2. Protect yourself against tracking without having to log out of websites while you browse. Websites in one container can't track your activity in other containers.
  3. Protection against Web security attacks. Any harmful clicks will be kept within that website's container, so attackers won't be able to hijack your information in other containers.
  4. Assignment: You can now assign a website to a container, so that a specific website will always open in a specific container. This helps protect from accidents, stopping you from accidentally visiting a shopping site in your banking container, for example.
  5. Hide and Show: Assume you use your browser for both Work and Personal tasks. When you come home at the end of the day, you don’t want to be thinking about “Work” anymore, but your browser is full of Work tabs. You can “Hide” your Work tabs and proceed with your Personal tasks. Then the next day, when you are back at work, you can “Hide” your Personal tabs and “Show” your Work tabs.
  6. Sort: The Container Menu has a “Sort Tabs” option and a “Move tabs to a new window” option. Sort Tabs will put all your tabs of the same container type next to each other in a given browser window. So if you have “Work” and “Personal” tabs interleaved within each other, you can easily sort them to help organize your tasks (as seen below). “Move tabs to a new window” will take all the container tabs in your current window and move them to a fresh window.

container_underline

How to add, remove or edit Containers

Menu: There is a new Container Menu button that is accessible in the toolbar with many container options. You can open a tab in a given container by clicking on the name of the container you want to open. You can create, delete, and edit containers. You can change the color or icon associated with a container or change the container name.

containers_menu3 Containers_menu2 containers_menu1

Note that Containers is disabled in Private Browsing and when Never Remember History is selected in your privacy preferences.

Advanced users: Change the privacy.userContext.ui.enabled setting to true in about:config in order to see Containers in the menu.

How to use Multi Account Containers

Dpwnload the extension from the AMO website

You can open new Container tabs and each one will keep separate browser storage (such as cookies or localStorage) from other Containers. Your normal tabs are the default container and will still look and act as you'd expect them to before enabling containers.

Open Containers

Look for the Containers icon:

Containers button

Click it and select the container you want to open.

Open links in new tabs and containers

You can open links in a new and/or different container. Right-click on any link, select Open link in New Container Tab, and then select the desired container tab.Hold the control keyCommand key while clicking a link to open it in a new tab. The new tab will open within the same container as the previous tab. This includes both the default container and in any of the predefined containers.

containers right-click


For more information about Containers, see the Containers project page.