Ask HN: What do Firefox containers do that Safari doesn’t?
I haven’t found any answer to this online but figure HN is the place to find out.
If I use Safari out of the box with third-party cookie blocking, default uBlock settings, and Pi-hole, what do Firefox containers add to the picture from a privacy perspective? Which specific types of tracking would be covered by containers and not these other tools?
Note: I’m not asking about UX or security unless it also has direct implications for privacy.
9 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] threadIt also adds some confidence that vulnerabilities won’t be used to track or crack sensitive interactions. For instance, if I log into my bank only in one container and browse untrusted sites only in another, I can be more confident that my bank account won’t be subjected to a XSS attack.
And then, some sites (AWS, I’m looking at you) make it really really difficult to manage multiple accounts from a single browser.
Finally, Safari’s extension ecosystem and developer tools kind of suck. This way I’ve got access to Firefox’s.
And if that’s the case, then if I am someone who is primary worried about being tracked by ad networks, then I don’t really need Firefox containers. Is that fair?
But yeah, containers are about isolation more than privacy. It’s like having multiple independent browser instances (each of which has a name and remembers your state and logins and such for just its own instance, even through restarts) at once.
So a concrete example would be that a container would block a Google Analytics script from setting a first-party tracking cookie if, for some reason, my ad blocker weren’t already blocking that script.
(My understanding is that, with third-party cookie blocking, cookies are already isolated, but not if a site has set up first-party cookie tracking. That tracking can only be blocked at the script level.)
Is that about right?
But a cookie set in one container is available only in that container, not in other containers.
What I am gathering from this discussion is that containers are really not targeted at privacy as a use case, unless you have an ad blockers that isn't effectively blocking specific scripts from setting tracking cookies.