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Topic: Containers, please? (Read 5109 times)

Containers, please?

Hi Emdek, and the Team,

As you have been working hard on Otter, I do not know if you have noticed quite new solutions in Firefox, and Brave, and maybe other browsers.
These are containers.
No, they are not "these" containers, they are those containers.
Precisely, Brave calls them "sessions", stupid. So far, sessions were all the opened tabs. Brendan Eich had to make a difference, really...

What it is about?
Imagine, you have several accounts on one website, and you need to use them simultaneously in a browser, for work, as we do. Poor you. Needed either to log out, and log in, and log out back, and log in back. Or you needed to open a browser in a new profile (FireFox has it).
For a long time it was impossible to open one tab logged in as Bingo, and open another tab, and log in into a same website as Mango. Nope.

But new hope has shined over us.
Containers, as the newest FireFox calls them. Or, stupid, sessions, as Brave names them.
Simply saying, you have a container #1, #2, and more.
You open one tab in a c1, and everything you do, stays there. So you open next tab, or a website in c2, and again, all passwords, logins stay only there. So you can have many containers opened simultanously, like profiles. Also, every website you open from a given container, will also stay in that container. No need to open a whole browser window.
So far, a missing thing is bookmarks in containers. I can only pin several tabs, for example, opened gmail accounts, having immediate access to each of them. But these have to be already opened tabs. None of the browsers (OK, don't know about IE and Edge) allows to bookmark a given website within a container.

So, Emdek, I think this feature will evolve, and develop, and if you want Otter to be the best, as good old Opera was, it might be better to think about the implementation now, than later.

Containers are now the only thing which keeps me with Brave, because Otter is faster. And we need them for work.

If you wish, please think about that thing.

And if you do so, I would humbly suggest to call containers--containers. Because this is what they are.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #1 –
And btw, my due respect to your work.
Brave is probably the fastest browser on PC, probably, but it has switched off ads. Otter is same fast without dumping them off.
If Otter worked properly with Google docs, well, we would not use anything else.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Pref on
Imagine, you have several accounts on one website, and you need to use them simultaneously in a browser, for work, as we do. Poor you. Needed either to log out, and log in, and log out back, and log in back. Or you needed to open a browser in a new profile (FireFox has it).
For a long time it was impossible to open one tab logged in as Bingo, and open another tab, and log in into a same website as Mango. Nope.
Or you could be logged in with one account in one browser, and with another account in another browser.

Sounds like containers are all about versatile cookie management. I have not found a browser that does this perfectly. Otter has a chance to become the first.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #3 –
Hi,
I'd appreciate such functionality too, it looks like, it comes close to a feature discussed some time ago (in a rather long thread  discussing feature request):
https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=211.msg37743#msg37743
and in several folower-posts, e.g.:
https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=211.msg37818#msg37818

Thanks for considering, if this would be viable,
   regards,
         vbr

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #4 –
Doesn't this already work when you log in to an online account, then open the same webpage again in a private tab and log in with another account? (The problem with this  is of course that it cannot be saved as a session...)

I'm asking because this is not how I operate. I operate with multiple different browsers to keep e.g. my Google accounts apart. Google accounts are seriously difficult to keep under control. When I log in to Gmail in one tab, Google tends to notice this and next thing I might be logged in to Youtube automatically, where I never want to be logged in.

Anyway, cookie trays or containers and management is a difficult question. I am torn between how I used to do things in (good old) Opera and some new tricks I learned after it became legacy.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: ersi on
Doesn't this already work when you log in to an online account, then open the same webpage again in a private tab and log in with another account? (The problem with this  is of course that it cannot be saved as a session...)

I'm asking because this is not how I operate. I operate with multiple different browsers to keep e.g. my Google accounts apart.
...
Yes, it works, as You describe, but the obvious non-persistence of the private tab is a drawback...
My current approach is very much like yours, only that these two browsers are both Otter, if possible; i.e. I have two separate  program folders with Otter (run as portable) - one for general browsing, and the other one for the mentioned web services with "more pervasive" accounts and autologin policies...
It generally works well, but e.g. updates must be done twice in parallel, and, obviously, it would get more complicated with multiple web pages, which should be kept isolated from each other, hence requiring yet more program folders.

I got the impression, that the approaches mentioned above in this thread, and also some previous considerations, would enable something in this manner to be viable within a single program folder - I can imagine e.g. configurable multiple profile paths with the related data, which could be generated on the fly if new "isolated instance" of the browser would be required, and which could - optionally - be persistent. But unfortunately, I have no idea, whether it is currently doable or how it would work together with current program internals, backends etc.

regards,
  vbr

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: ersi on
Or you could be logged in with one account in one browser, and with another account in another browser.

Well, that would be a terrible workaround. Firefox with its versatile profile management before Quantum would do it better.
Also, it means higher memory usage. We have six company's profiles on gmail to deal with different projects. Six browsers running?! And each of them deals with Google Docs differently?

Containers solve everything.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: ersi on
Doesn't this already work when you log in to an online account, then open the same webpage again in a private tab and log in with another account? (The problem with this  is of course that it cannot be saved as a session...)

Exactly. For work that would be annoying.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Pref on
Also, it means higher memory usage. We have six company's profiles on gmail to deal with different projects. Six browsers running?! And each of them deals with Google Docs differently?

Containers solve everything.
Not necessarily 6 different browsers, but 6 different instances of the same browser. This may seem like an over-complicated version of the containers idea, but in the mean time it does the job.

Re: Containers, please?

Reply #9 –
Hi,
I was wondering, whether the current work on "identites" mentioned on the Otter page, might be something akin to the functionality of containers discussed here; cf.:
https://otter-browser.org/
"Weekly report #274 (2019-04-01)
Working on identities concept:"

Could probably someone shed some light on this current topic?
That would certainly be a great news.

Thanks and regards,
   vbr