Engineering

Demoing Web Applications with Firefox Containers

When demoing a feature to product, stakeholders, or other engineers, it's often useful to have multiple sessions open at a time. A common approach is to use the browser's private browsing mode, such as Chrome's incognito or Firefox's private windows. This can cause issues, however, when the demo necessitates more than two sessions, or you would like to prepare multiple scenarios ahead of time.

Several browsers have some sort of feature which can solve this problem, such as Chrome's profiles, but to my knowledge none of them solve it as elegantly as Firefox with the Multi-Account Containers extension. Multi-Account Containers allows one browser window, with one browser profile, to have tabs with completely separate cookies, so switching sessions is as simple as switching tabs.

My personal container setup has 8 containers, with one being my personal container for personal accounts (such as my personal Google account) and the rest used for developing and demoing with multiple Ladder sessions.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers list containing containers labelled "Personal", "Blue", "Teal", "Green", "Yellow", "Orange", "Purple", and "Red", with the "Personal" container having a pink sunglasses icon to the left, and the color-named containers having a dot of that color

In the Multi-Account Containers menu, opening a tab in a container is as simple as clicking the container you want. Then, you can have as many sessions as you want of one website, all in one browser window!