tl;dr: separate all personal data to individual containers in one firefox instance? install:

scroll down to the 1. 2. 3. and so on list, change the settings and have fun

the firefox multi-account containers extension is awesome to separate cookies, account and tracking related stuff into separate containers. one can use it to log in to multiple google accounts or to separate a facebook login and the facebook tracking from regular browsing. containers preserve privacy better since they limit all the personal data to this one container.

I have my containers set up like this:

  • shopping (for shopping related things, like amazon and.. amazon?)
  • social (reddit, tildes, lobste.rs, hacker news and so on)
  • finance (my banking)
  • chat (discord, slack, telegram, whatsapp)
  • misc (or just call it stuff, like github)

if you open up an url, let’s say google.com you can use the containers extension as well to always open up google.com in a particular container, this makes total sense and is awesome. and now we’re already at the point where the containers extension lacks features. if you do your google search, you usually end up on some other site, this site will stay in your google container forever. after a day of browsing around, or if you’re like me, a few minutes of googleing around you’ll notice that you’re still in the google container and the whole privacy gain from setting this up in the first place just feels out of place. I end up on stackoverflow, am still in the google container and now I’m getting google ads and yeah, full circle.

fortunately someone built another extension, called temporary containers and it does exactly what we want:

Open tabs, websites, and links in automatically managed disposable containers. Containers isolate data websites store (cookies, storage, and more) from each other, enhancing your privacy and security while you browse.

long story short, just change the following settings in temporary containers to get the best from both extensions:

  1. open up temporary containers settings
  2. go to isolation
  3. add all your existing containers to the list in: exclude permanent containers
  4. open up (still in the isolation tab) multi-account containers
  5. change setting to isolate

this will make sure that your google stuff stays in your google container, but if you click a link in gmail or google search result, it’ll be opened in a new tab. let’s say you open a link to amazon and you have configured amazon in your shopping container, it’ll be opened in the shopping container.