No. This is a misconception that is being spread around. I don't know what FF containers are useful for, but they certainly do not function to replace Chrome's profiles:
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
I don’t know about profiles, so I can’t speak to that. All I can do is say that I use containers to open multiple tabs of the same site with different users.
For example, I have multiple AWS accounts. To login to two different ones at the same time, I use different containers. Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc. When I open a link from a container in a new tab it opens in the same container.
Containers are great to "containerize" cookies but that's about it.
If you have multiple "personas", like a personal account with bookmarks and a work account with another set of bookmarks and settings, you'll want a separate profile.
Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for. You'll find that Profiles are an improvement over Containers for tasks like that (logging into the same URL as different identities) for all the reasons I list above.
> Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc
> Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for.
I'm not quite sure how profiles work in Chrome, but from a Firefox point-of-view this is only true if you also want to keep your history/bookmarks/settings/add-ons completely separate, too.
Yes, history, bookmarks and extensions are separate. I have one profile for "me in my personal life" and "me at work", and a few for testing logins to different interfaces at work. So this degree of separation is mostly what I want, although it can be a little annoying to maintain the extensions you want under both profiles.
Keeping history separate in particular is very valuable since nowadays the fastest / least hassle way to bring up a site is to start typing the beginning of the URL in the navigation bar, so you wouldn't want work URLs mixed in with non-work URLs.
