Multi-Account Containers Add-on on Mozilla VPN

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/mozilla-vpn/multi-account-containers-add-on-on-mozilla-vpn/

by alexrustic • 4 years ago

141 91 4 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

mikece2• 4 years ago

Multi-account containers are THE reason I cannot switch away from Firefox (not that I have a desire to do so). Tying in a custom VPN location to a container is very nice but I wish I could specify a different VPN provider per container. For example: to log into my email or MS Teams account for work connect to my employer's VPN; to connect to Gmail use the Mozilla VPN; to connect to favorite "free-range, independently sourced" videos website I would want yet another VPN... and TOR enabled.

That said, what is so hard about Multi-account containers that Chromium doesn't have it?

sorokod• 4 years ago

Lost revenue most likely.

georgyo• 4 years ago

I use Firefox and don't use containers, but I have a friend who can't use Firefox because it doesn't have multiple profiles.

Chrome can create multiple browser windows that are isolated from each other, making a very clear distinction of scope.

Firefox has containers, chromium has profiles. They accomplish the same goals is sightly different ways.

buscoquadnary• 4 years ago

Firefox does have multiple profiles.

BeefWellington2• 4 years ago

Firefox has both profiles and containers.

However, the UX for Firefox's profiles feature is godawful.

Lately though, I find I prefer not to trust the application to manage this and just launch separate profiles in their own separate app namespaces using things like firecracker, firejail, or similar (depending on need).

peakaboo2• 4 years ago

about:profiles

You can have as many as you want.

satysin• 4 years ago

but I have a friend who can't use Firefox because it doesn't have multiple profiles.

Did you or your friend not even try and Google for "firefox profiles"? Because if you did you would have found the following link as the top result

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Profiles have been in Firefox for longer than I can remember. I am pretty sure longer than Chrome has existed.

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

Check out the Profiler Switcher for Firefox add-on[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

newhotelowner• 4 years ago

No. Firefox is way better. Firefox has profiles & containers. I just wish FF has a better support for PDF.

I keep my NSFW Firefox profile in a veracrypt drive. Using about:profiles I can launch the profile that I want to use, and start from previous session.

warent• 4 years ago

Except that the behavior of creating a new tab via the + button vs. CMD+T (in Mac) is that one of them creates a tab in the active container and one of them does not. This is a dealbreaker for me and kills the hype.

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...

red_trumpet• 4 years ago

For me (Xubuntu 20.04), both behave the same: They open a new tab with no container (which could be considered the "standard container").

peakaboo2• 4 years ago

Because Google doesn't want you to have privacy and avoid tracking. They are in the camp that wants more of it, and they want to control it fully on the entire world wide Web.

dblohm7• 4 years ago

Containers are plumbed throughout Gecko. It's not trivial to add, but it's not intractable either. Somebody has to be willing to put in the effort, more than anything.

javajosh3• 4 years ago

I suspect that account containers in Firefox has very, very low uptake. Why? Because it's a feature that is difficult to understand - it has nuance to it. Just understanding what it does for you requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of how browsers work, and how websites work. If uptake is low, it makes sense that Google would not prioritize the feature. As a happy coincidence, this also keeps the maintstream web in place, a relatively simpler mental model for ad tech software devs working on the web, where your starting point is a user browser capable of moving small strings between origins without the user's knowledge or consent.

Which leads me to the idea that maybe the feature should be better motivated! Perhaps we can show the user a meaningful and well-defined number, comparing for example the sheer size of a normal request vs one made in a container. If necessary, you can dig deeper into the payload, and ask questions of the system like, "What are they saying about me and my activity, using my own browser as a communication channel?" This latter one could be quite fun and take community contributions, small code snippets that know how to parse a request and interpret and display the meaning to the user.

This is where the imagination of a developer can be helpful, to basically characterize as completely as possible the patterns we expect to see. Because so far, that's a very low-level mechanism, and clearly there's more room for protocols - and given the nature of this problem, multiple, overlapping, dynamic protocols that are proprietary in nature. We can imagine origins that just suck everything in, doing unknown processing on that data, but giving us tools to measure aggregate engagement. The need to define an audience on something more than source IP becomes immediately apparent, and permissive 3rd party cookies have enabled a huge ecosystem to arise, and each persistent part of that is specialized in some way. But the money is in showing users ads, and showing them really useful ads. This means measuring the users and trying to anticipate their needs. We can base this on "identity" facts that don't vary much over time, or on "behavior" facts that vary a lot over time, albeit with lots of consistency for most of it. Both are used to predict what a user wants enough to spend money on. In particular, behavior, what are they asking about, learning about? What sorts of tools and supplies - things you can buy - are associated with the subject?

TBH if this happened on the client side, I wouldn't find it creepy at all; I'd find it quite useful. There are really two problems with server side processing of identity and behavior: first, it quickly gets bigoted when people are asked to associate an identity with a consumer demand. Who gets to make this association? Are we okay with this being a self-reenforcing mechanism since we are pushing identities toward the behaviors we associate with their stereo-type? Second, it lets servers split the internet without our knowledge. The incentive to garner as much attention as possible leads inevitably to breaking our shared perception of the world. At least, back in the day, you could argue with someone over a book, and know you have read the same book. But now, the book is a screen, basically a browser, and it is very different for each individual, and no-one is fully aware of this truth.

I'm being utterly serious when I say that these are the kinds of issues, technical and philosophical, that users need to be aware of before they can get excited about a feature like tab containers. Given the level of civic discourse in the wider world, my hope that people would be open to learning about it is slim to none. Heck, even most devs prefer not to think about it, and just make the changes the money wants to make, without regard to the users benefit. Then of course there is the secondary market for this data, law enforcement. You could probably get 80% of a panopticon by just hoovering Google analytics data for "alternative" processing. You get the rest by piggy-backing Cloudflare and the like. The interesting thing about CF and other CDNs is that they can provide an alternate, and unavoidable, surveillance function, since they can use access logs, and you cannot use the software without getting the bytes. This ends up being a strong argument in favor of content-addressable resources, rather than named resources: they would let a client rotate physical access, and these segmented logs would make it hard to recreate a coherent timeline. But not impossible: if enough sources cooperated, the could aggregate their logs and you'd lose your anonymity.

No, what the world needs is not just a defensive thing like tab containers, but a more aggressive thing. Rather than isolate an account's data, why not provide all the connectivity it wants, but poison the well. Manipulate the messages sent out by your computer to mislead these trackers: shift identities, access different resources, do different things in those resources. It should look identical to ordinary host lookup traffic, but the messages will be different, noisy, worse than useless. Maybe call them "active defense containers".

jatone3• 4 years ago

users understand the idea, firefox just makes it hard to use conceptually. I see tons of everyday people using chrome's profiles which are effectively the same thing at the window level and its clear what context you're in.

while firefox's concept is more powerful its also harder to use appropriately.

ipaddr4• 4 years ago

The problem each container takes more resources.

You can wait for google to copy features. You might be waiting for a longtime.

mikece2• 4 years ago

I suspect that account containers in Firefox has very, very low uptake. Why? Because it's a feature that is difficult to understand - it has nuance to it.

Every time I've demonstrated containers to someone they "got it" right away. Some were unimpressed and didn't see how it would benefit them while others were blown away and ran off to install it on their machine, but seeing how I could log into the same website in different containers with different credentials -- without having to spawn new profile windows -- is not that hard of a concept to grasp. Explaining the "why would I want to?" is a different question entirely.

gigel823• 4 years ago

You can use different VPN providers per-container-type; go to manage containers, select your container type, then click on Advanced proxy settings (last option); there you can input a proxy address.

For testing, you can just type the SOCKS5 address from your VPN provider, but that's not very secure.

In my case, I have a Pi running a few Dockers (with network pairs of OpenVPN/WireGuard + Socks5 proxies); it works decently enough, I can even use streaming services like Netflix / etc. if that's something you care about.

travisporter• 4 years ago

Very cool! So if I assume that my ISP is recording/selling my browsing history, including which sites I visit, would this setup prevent me from being snooped on? I don't know if DNS goes over the socks5

commoner5• 4 years ago

If you use Mullvad VPN, you can configure a different exit node per Firefox container using the SOCKS5 proxy setting. Each Mullvad server provides SOCKS5 proxy access to every other Mullvad server:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/different-entryexit-node-using-w...

These SOCKS5 proxies are only accessible when Mullvad VPN is on, so the security is no worse than not using the proxy.

Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad, and both VPNs use the same SOCKS5 proxy mechanism to switch your location. The Multi-Account Containers add-on is better integrated with Mozilla VPN, but the feature works well with Mullvad, too.

brazzledazzle• 4 years ago

Your work’s VPN might have a strict policy against split tunnel VPN clients. Or they might have narrowly defined lists of IP blocks they split for bandwidth purposes (e.g. Microsoft’s O365 blocks to reduce teams bandwidth). If you think about it a split VPN tunnel with a default route to the internet effectively makes your client a bridge between your internal corporate network and the rest of the world. A bridge that browses the web and installs downloaded binaries.

Just something to look into since it could get you spanked by your net or sec team if your company has those.

fomine3• 4 years ago

Google have incentive not to implement it because of they earn $$$$$$ from tracking ads.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

Ok, but where the hell are my Android extensions? It's been years, what possible excuse is there? Either admit you just don't care about extensions so I stop wasting my time, or stop wasting resources on pointless vanity projects and get your shit together. Every new random thing like this is an insult to longstanding users who are still wanting for the baseline experience they had years ago.

kmeisthax• 4 years ago

Still can't believe we live in a world where iOS has web extensions before Android does

celsoazevedo2• 4 years ago

Firefox for Android does support (proper) browser extensions. I have uBlock Origin, for example. The problem is that by default Mozilla only allows a small number of extensions since the redesign/new Firefox.

There's a way to use the other extensions, but it requires FF nightly and our own list of extensions:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

sudosysgen2• 4 years ago

Firefox on Android has had extensions for a while now. I'm using them everyday. It's just that you can't use all extensions on it as of now.

captn3m02• 4 years ago

Or iOS extensions. All browsers should stop calling them “Web Extensions” if they arr never going to be available to the majority of the web users.

fsflover• 4 years ago

Or iOS extensions.

Because Apple doesn't allow Firefox on iOS, it's just a Safari skin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191.

celsoazevedo2• 4 years ago

Since all browsers on iOS are forced to use Webkit, I don't see how Mozilla can add Firefox extensions to their iOS browser.

dang• 4 years ago

Please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You may not feel that you owe deprivers of Android extensions better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

sprokolopolis• 4 years ago

I just use this feature and it works for most of the extensions that I want to use: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

commoner5• 4 years ago

Yep, that's the provided workaround. If you don't want to use Firefox Nightly, these Firefox forks based on the stable channel have access to all of https://addons.mozilla.org through the same steps:

- Mull: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

- Fennec F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

- Iceraven: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

Another Mozilla PR piece regarding "privacy"... let me see, did they finally bundle (or reimplement) uBlock Origin as a standard feature of the browser? No. Did they make telemetry opt-in as required per the GDPR? No. Did they stop opening Mozilla webpages on first run which contain Google Analytics (also in breach of the GDPR)? No.

Snark aside, this change (for once!) does have some benefits. Tracking using IP address & user-agent alone is pretty strong regardless of cookies/etc and can't be completely blocked client-side when you do need to load the requested resource (such as browsing the malicious website, or third-party websites using Google Fonts/ReCaptcha/etc), so containing these within their own VPN, separate from other browsing activity is an effective countermeasure.

james-redwood• 4 years ago

They derive nearly 90% of their revenue from allowing Google to be the default search engine. Default uBlock is an impossibility. If you’d like Firefox with that feature, try the LibreWolf fork.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

That doesn't prevent me from calling them out on their bullshit. You want to make money from ads? Fine, but don't go around shouting "PRIVACY" at every possible opportunity and giving people a false sense of security.

probably_wrong• 4 years ago

While I agree with most of your points, I don't want Firefox to implement uBlock Origin.

Should Firefox prioritize compatibility with it? Yes. Should the uBlock Origin developers have the personal cell phone of Mozilla's CTO? Also yes. But there's nothing to be gained from absorbing it, and all we'll get is more bureaucracy.

If anything, I'd like Firefox to focus more on their core product, not less.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

My argument is that Firefox should have functionality equivalent to uBlock Origin by default, so that less tech-savvy users who install the "privacy" focused browser actually get some without having to browse for extra add-ons and potentially install an inferior or outright malicious option.

j1elo• 4 years ago

Maybe not integrating it, but allowing uBlock Origin to use Firefox Sync and sync filter lists and other settings would be very useful on Firefox for Android:

* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage#firefox...

Firefox for Android can't sync extensions settings. This is tracked in Bugzilla #1316442.

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1316442

DavideNL• 4 years ago

Note that you can also assign containers to a specific vpn (for example Mullvad) with Container Proxy:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...

okanesen2• 4 years ago

Even though I'm using Container Proxy myself, you can almost do the same thing with the official plugin (Manage Containers -> Click any Container -> Advanced proxy settings).

anonymousab• 4 years ago

This seems a bit weird as containers still share history and other data between them. I get that they're not supposed to replace profiles, but this feature seems more suited to a per-profile basis than per-container because of said leakage. Of course, you can already do per-profile VPNs via split tunneling and a --profile specifier on startup, but it'd be nice to have a better UI within Firefox itself for the idea.

alexrustic• 4 years ago

Multi-Account Containers Add-on on Mozilla VPN

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