Disposable (throw-away) Containers

[girst]

Temporary Containers Addon works well for this purpose!

I'd like to have an option to generate a new temporary container on-the-fly - sort of a private tab instead of a private window. These disposable containers should be destroyed automatically, when the last tab is closed.

This is how I imagine the workflow:

• right click a link -> Open in New Container Tab -> Disposable Container
• click tool bar icon -> (+) New Disposable Container

in #429 (closed by the author), the addon Containers on the Go has been mentioned, which seems to implement this feature, but is proprietary software.

[groovecoder]

I'm starting a new label called "good extra addon" for issues like this. We are pointing add-on authors to this repo for ideas for "follow-up" addons that extend on the core MAC add-on.

[Narvey]

@groovecoder if that's going to be the model, why not make the core features built-in instead of an addon?

[groovecoder]

@Narvey that's a good point.

Over the course of the Test Pilot experiment, we learned that Containers is still mostly a power-user feature. Distributing as an add-on works for power users, and it lets us work on the code-base outside of the Firefox release models.

[stoically]

I'm currently working on a MIT version of Temporary/Throw-away Containers. It lacks any possibility to set personal preferences yet, but I'm planning to add them soon. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

[stoically]

@groovecoder I've implemented a feature for the Temporary Container Add-on where it'll automatically open tabs in temporary containers when Middle Mouse Clicking (can't preventDefault them in Firefox) on links. Thing is that I have to deal with race-conditions where MAC also wants to reopen the link, either for the confirm page ("always open in $") or directly in the target container ("remember my choice").

It would be nice if there would be a way to interface with MAC to handle these cases sanely. Maybe providing the list of URLs (including the "remember"-choice) when asked by a whitelisted extensionid (runtime.onMessage)? That way I could predict what MAC is going to do (somewhat at least, opening the same link multiple times in quick succession would probably still be tricky). If you have other ideas or suggestions how to handle this I'd absolutely interested to hear them. I could also start to dig into MAC and start with a Pull Request for an interface. Thanks for your work!

Edit: This got implemented with #1095

[grahamperrin]

Temporary Containers 0.90 with Waterfox 56.2.0:

I understand that there'll be no automated interop with other container-oriented extensions, that's not a concern here.

Stats work:

– and so on.

I don't expect to use advanced features any time soon.

$ pkg info waterfox | grep Version
Version        : 56.2.0.31
$ date ; uname -v
Sat  2 Jun 2018 04:32:53 BST
FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #3 r334382: Thu May 31 01:37:12 BST 2018     root@momh167-gjp4-hpelitebook8570p-freebsd:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC