Containers in Firefox Has Changed The Way I Work

Do you ever need to log in to the same service or site but don’t want to have to log out and log back in every time, still using the same browser? Me too.

I don't know if it's a new feature or not, but I was listening the the recent episode of Mac Power Users with guest Brett Terpstra, and they had a discussion about browsers on the desktop, and Brett said that he had primarily switched to Firefox. Mozilla’s Firefox had been forgotten for a while but has received a bit of a resurgence among the Privacy Wars.

I have Firefox on my Mac, but I never liked the aesthetic. It looked too squared off and unfinished. I absolutely love the design of Google Chrome, but can’t get around the fact that it’s tracking my every move online and that it chews up battery power faster than all other browsers. I had settled on Safari as an “I guess I’ll just use this” because of the fact that it’s Mac-native and syncs with Safari on my phone.

Then Brett mentioned Fencing and Containers, two features that I had never looked into in Firefox. Fencing is an extension, say for Facebook, that keeps all activity, tracking, and cookies within that tab. You can even have multiple Facebook logins in separate tabs. And I thought to myself, “Man, that would be really handy if I could do that for other websites as well.” And it turns out that you can.

Containers in action after you right-click on a tab.

Firefox Containers is an option when you right-click on a tab, you can open that tab in a self-contained tab called a Container. It’s the same thing as Fencing, without the tracking protections from what I can tell.

For the past few months during the pandemic I have had to log out of my personal Squarespace site and log back into Graymere’s, log out and log into one that I’m working on for a church, and so on. Now, I can have all those tabs available at a click in Firefox. It saves great deal of time.

I can also run separate YouTube logins. Because I don’t want to watch retro video game videos on Graymere’s account, I can easily have my personal YouTube and YouTube Studio for the church in seperate tabs now, and they don’t switch back on me automatically.

For the longest time I tried to use this within Private or Incognito Modes, but since those modes are designed to keep your web browing private, they didn’t give you any of the features like password logins and remembered histories. Firefox Containers solves that.