Auto-Container for Set Sites

Firefox Containers
#1

Hi everyone,

I created an account for the purpose of this single question, so hopefully it’s worth it. The idea is quite simple. I have created 7 different Containers that I currently use: Personal Life; University Work; Random Search; Social Media; Shopping; News; and Finance. I will obviously use certain websites only in certain Containers, such as Facebook/Twitter in Social Media, and Amazon in Shopping.

The idea that I hope could be created is that instead of always having to pick a Container, one might be able to merely open a new tab, go to (for example) “www.facebook.com” and that Container be allocated the “Social Media” Container. Essentially, the ability for Containers (the program) to recognise frequently visited websites in exclusive Containers (e.g. I only visit Facebook in my Social Media tab, and only BBC in my News tab).

Whilst I am no competent programmer, I have done Computer Science before and this could be done in two quite simple ways:

  1. Manual Allocation - I spend 30 minutes allocating specific websites to specific Containers. If I ever navigate to that website, it will be placed into that Container Tab. It simply makes the process of Containerisation (a lovely word, not usually used in this sense) more efficient.

  2. Basic Algorithm - A basic algorithm that recognises when websites are visited, and are exclusive to a single container.

Thanks for reading,

Jacob

p.s. I am not sure how allocating container after navigating to a link would affect cookies moving across different containers. Maybe that’s a problem. But, that’s for you guys to work out so good luck! By the way, I love Containers, so thanks for making it :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

There’s a website assignment feature in the latest version of the experiment.

https://jotter.jonathankingston.co.uk/blog/2017/04/04/containers-assignment/

It’s not super-obvious, so we’re about to release an update to the experiment that adds an on-boarding panel for it.

2 Likes
#3

We call this feature “container assignment” for lack of a better name.

As @groovecoder mentioned we are hard work of adding clearer explanation to this feature. This was the most asked for feature on GitHub and we originally didn’t want to create it at all (See my blog post to why if you like seeing big ranty posts :smiley:)

  1. We are going to expose more “current tab” assignment in the container panel, we are also going to show a complete list of existing assignments so you can see and delete them.

  2. This is something I have thought about also, I like to call this “onboarding” and there are many ways we can probably use this to streamline 1) overtime. It is a little out of scope of our experiment unfortunately. We also currently don’t have History within Firefox tagged by containers which leads to this problem requiring an extension to log the history and tabs itself which is likely to cause performance issues too. Anyway we are certainly thinking about this issue, I would suggest it isn’t a priority to the team at the moment (tagging history is a dependency to making this work cleanly, which we require for syncing containers too).

I am not sure how allocating container after navigating to a link would affect cookies moving across different containers

It basically doesn’t and it is one of the next most asked for features within containers. Cookies moving from one container to another would permit trackers to work across a container boundary. There are some solutions here but they are vastly complex and unlikely to be implemented.

1 Like
#4

I’m aware of at least three extension-based plans/solutions.

Multi-Account Containers

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/503

… pages in containers have a “Open always in this container”, …

– but (sorry) I don’t use auto-assignment, so I can’t tell whether what’s quoted is a feature of Firefox containers, or of the Multi-Account Containers extension.

Conex

https://github.com/kesselborn/conex/issues/41

Containerise

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/containerise/

… Map multiple domains to a container with simple csv based config. …

#5

Conex is still marked as experimental.

Containerise isn’t on my addon list yet as it likely should be marked as experimental.

But yeah both are very promising to be fixing this issue :slight_smile:

1 Like