Firefox Launches Multi-Identity Containers

Firefox now lets you browse and log into accounts under different identities in order to keep your accounts separate.

It’s a pain to have to constantly log in and out of different internet accounts–say, your Gmail or your Amazon account. And if those separate accounts have a specific reason for being set up individually, such as having a personal shopping account with Amazon as well as access to a business account through your employer, the risk of blending your worlds is pretty serious. Even worse is the risk of sending a workplace email from your personal account, or accidentally posting a fun-but-compromising photo in your more professionally-minded Facebook account.

Over the years, various ways to combat the problem have been launched. Everything from whole platforms like Hootsuite or TweetDeck are designed to help you manage multiple social media “personalities,” while browser add-ons like Multifox have tried to help you create two easy but distinct browser identities.

Now, Mozilla has launched a Firefox feature called Containers, and it gives you four separate but pre-designed identities for browsing and logging into accounts. Even better, each identity is contained within an easily accessible tab at the top of your screen. Containers gives you one identity for personal use, one for work, one for sensitive browsing called “banking,” and one for shopping.

According to the developer, “With Containers, users can open tabs in multiple different contexts – Personal, Work, Banking, and Shopping.  Each context has a fully segregated cookie jar, meaning that the cookies, indexeddb, localStorage, and cache that sites have access to in the Work Container are completely different than they are in the Personal Container. That means that the user can login to their work twitter account on twitter.com in their Work Container and also login to their personal twitter on twitter.com in their Personal Container.”

Containers sounds great on paper, and if it actually works as the creators designed it, it stands to streamline the process of logging into and functioning within lots of different accounts. However, with its reliance on a simple, clickable tab, it might take some strict discipline on the part of the user to make sure he’s not in the wrong tab when posting or accessing content. Being logged into the wrong email account is bad enough; clicking your mouse on the wrong identity tab could prove disastrous.

Take advantage of this latest feature by downloading Firefox now here.