Privacy is a full time job, part 2


In this article, I discuss wrangling temporary containers, multi account containers and tridactyl.


First off, despite being an official Firefox addon, the multi account containers GUI seems to be really laggy and buggy for some reason. It's also not very intuitive. The settings are spread across the preferences (not the addons screen) and the addon icon. I initially ignored the addon icon because I thought it was just a pointless welcome screen, turns out before you can actually change any settings you NEED to click past that.


The next problem is interoperability between tridactyl and temporary containers. Tridactyl has support for containers, but only named containers. Further, when you open tabs, it will try to open the site in the same container with the focused tab. In order to ensure that clicking links or opening new tabs will create a new temporary container, you have to configure the Isolation settings in temporary containers. Specifically set Global -> Navigation -> Target Domain to "Different from Tab Domain & Subdomains". I did the same thing for mouse click.


Next, I added some autocmds (based on the example tridactylrc) to redirect some URLs to more privacy friendly ones. Unfortunately, the urlmodify command seems to be a little restrictive and is difficult to get working properly.


autocmd DocStart (https?://)reddit.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "reddit.com", "teddit.net")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)www.reddit.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "www.reddit.com", "teddit.net")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)old.reddit.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "old.reddit.com", "teddit.net")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)twitter.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "twitter.com", "nitter.42l.fr")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)mobile.twitter.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "mobile.twitter.com", "nitter.42l.fr")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)youtube.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "youtube.com", "vid.puffyan.us")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)www.youtube.com js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "www.youtube.com", "vid.puffyan.us")
autocmd DocStart (https?://)youtu.be js tri.excmds.urlmodify("-t", "youtu.be", "vid.puffyan.us")

Note: this needs to be modified because it will open vid.puffyan.us twice due to the www subdomain redirect.


I add all of these combinations manually because I can't figure out how to use capture groups with urlmodify. With the aforementioned settings, it opens the site THEN rewrites the url, leading to the unfortunate situation where the original tab will be open while the new tab is opened in the same container (i.e, vid.puffyan.us will be opened in the Youtube container). I changed the multi account containers setting to only open containers for designated sites.


All in all, this is very janky and will trip you up if you're not paying attention. I'm sure there are still subtle problems i'm not aware of that I will need to fix in time.



remyabel.flounder.online/