Firefox Containers Add-on
“Day 23: Separate Cookie Jars.”
I recently installed Firefox's Multi-Account Containers add-on.
In the past I've used Sandboxie – a mechanism in Windows for creating sandboxed areas. But abstracting at the OS layer means having multiple windows running, and most of the time I've not bothered.
I moved my browsing from Chrome back to Firefox a few months ago, and need some privacy add-ons. I'm currently running:
- Privacy Badger: I put this in first
- uBlock: Added afterwards, and stopping a lot of trackers getting to Privacy Badger
- ClearURLs: For where tracking is in the URL
- Cookie AutoDelete: So cookie are only stored for sites I choose to whitelist
Most of the time this gives an acceptable balance between privacy and convenience. If a page comes out malformed I'll temporarily disable them one by one until I've found the problem and either put in an exception or decide not to use that site.
Firefox multi-account containers give another layer of abstraction. It overlays a set of “containers” that you create (it comes out-of-the-box with some templates: personal, work, shopping, banking). Each of these containers can be considered a separate “cookie jar” giving both protection from tracking and convenience.
It's particularly convenient if you have multiple accounts on a particular site. For example, I have a personal AWS account where I store backups, digital photos, and run experimental machines. I also have a work account for AWS lab work. Being able to have separate sets of cookies stored for these two accounts is really useful.
Conversely, if I follow a link someone has posted on Facebook then that link opens in the same container as my Facebook account – it can't harvest cookies and history from normal activity.
I now have an MO for web browsing and web enabled services with which I'm happy.
This post is day 23 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.