Multi-account-containers: Manuallly move / reorder / sort containers list (not tabs) in Multi Account Containers add-on

[tienkietboi]

For who want to move / re-order / sort containers (not tabs) like me, which the way I'm really want to sort this for my job purpose. As I seen in topic #1199 #1099 #1077 #979 #895 #657 #405 #330, @falolaf alrd tell us the way to make it by: "Not very convenient but you can manually rearrange the containers in the containers.json in your profile folder. Close FF before changing that file though!" in topic #1199.

I'm not a coder, but can follow his way to make amazing change. This is my first post on Github for anyone want to do it! Thanks again to @falolaf.

1. Close your Firefox
2. Open My Computer, find "containers.json" (for anyone not know how to open like me)
3. The location is the same with:
C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qbb0olko.default
4. It's a long long row code, it will be difficult to sort for whom not know code. Now, make it easy by press Enter one by one like this: {"userContextId":9,"public":true,"icon":"chill","color":"red","name":"Container 1"},

Press Enter after comma }, as my sample code below:

{"version":3,"lastUserContextId":31,"identities":[
{"userContextId":9,"public":true,"icon":"chill","color":"red","name":"Container 1"},
{"userContextId":1,"public":true,"icon":"fingerprint","color":"red","name":"Container 2"},
{"userContextId":11,"public":true,"icon":"cart","color":"red","name":"Container 3"}
]} 

Ok sort it by your way and then Save it, and open Firefox to see this change!

P/s to Dev Team: Plz make it sortable on frond-end by Title, Drag-Drop by Purpose, ... Waiting for your next update, great job to your team! Thanks for this amazing add-on.

[doctopus]

You could access the profile folder by typing about:profiles in the address bar and click show in finder.

[tienkietboi]

You could access the profile folder by typing about:profiles in the address bar and click show in finder.

I've left Firefox but thanks for advice, hope this helpful for everyone! 👯

[DanHarkless]

Yes, the lack of the ability to manually or alphabetically sort the containers in the UI has been a great source of irritation to me as well. Until such a feature gets added, thanks very much, tienkietboi, for the tip on manually editing the JSON file.

BTW, for anyone undertaking this, please note that you will need to make sure all of your sorted userContextId lines have a comma at the end except for the last one. If you start Firefox without this being the case, then Firefox will not be able to parse the JSON file, and it'll throw away all your user-defined containers, all their cookies, and will go back to the default container set. I'm a programmer, so I was even watching out for this issue, but I screwed up when I decided at the last minute to change my manual sort order and forgot to relocate the stray comma. So be careful.

Also, if you've deleted some of the default containers, you'll still find their lines in the containers.json, but with blanked-out parameters, and '"public":false'. It's a good idea to move all such lines to the bottom of the list, make sure there's no comma on the last one, and then you won't have to worry about comma issues on your custom container lines above.

[kevinblumenfeld]

THIS IS 100% UNTESTED!!! DON'T USE THIS!!
I am just seeing if I could spark interest in something more robust.
Currently, this is just for Windows.
All feedback welcome.

# Currently orders the Firefox Container menu by color, icon and then by name
# The line that reads 'Sort-Object -Property color, icon, name' can change that behavior
# THIS IS NOT TESTED, DO NOT USE THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER!!
# AGAIN THIS IS COMPLETELY UNTESTED!!
# I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOUR FIREFOX OR COMPUTER IS DAMAGED IN ANY WAY!!

Get-Process -ProcessName FireFox -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
    ForEach-Object {
    $null = $_.closemainwindow()
}

$index = 0
do {
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
    $index++
    if ($index -gt 30) {
        Write-Error "Unable to close Firefox - halting"
        break
    }
} while (Get-Process -ProcessName Firefox -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)

Write-Warning 'Ordering Firefox Containers menu.'
Write-Warning 'Do not open Firefox until complete...'

$ContainersPath = "$env:APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles"
Get-ChildItem -Path $ContainersPath -File 'containers.json' -Recurse |
    ForEach-Object {
    $Json = Get-Content $_.FullName -Raw |
        ConvertFrom-Json
    $Json.identities = $Json.identities |
        Sort-Object -Property color, icon, name
    $Json | ConvertTo-Json |
        Set-Content $_.FullName
}
'Ordering complete'

[DanHarkless]

Kevin: Cool stuff. I'll add for people who aren't familiar with it that that's a PowerShell script, and you'd manually run it to sort the containers (i.e. this isn't some code you add to a Firefox file somewhere).

[kevinblumenfeld]

@DanHarkless thank you! and thank you for clarifying that for others!!

[ReporterX]

This feature is still not implemented after two years. Sigh!
There is an extension which can display the containers alphabetically. For those who use a lot of containers, this is great.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/

[abawany]

It seems that closing Firefox before editing containers.json is important. I tried it without doing that and then restarted Firefox. While the containers came up in the suggested order, their underlying cookies/local storage remained associated with the old profile.

[JohnLGalt]

It seems that closing Firefox before editing containers.json is important. I tried it without doing that and then restarted Firefox. While the containers came up in the suggested order, their underlying cookies/local storage remained associated with the old profile.

That's why step 1 is to close Firefox. :)

I am a bit disappointed that there is not a UI to do this already, but the instructions up there are pretty clear, so I'm going to do this myself.

Having a UI would be better, though....

EDIT: It worked.

[JohnLGalt]

Caveat - after reordering, any container that had sites already logged in had to relogin. But every container still works perfectly fine.

[dailyherold]

For Ubuntu users (possibly other distros), vim /home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/containers.json. Not sure if there's a chance of being more than one *.default directory, but for me there was only one, and I was able to edit the containers.json file while Firefox closed and see my desired order upon re-opening. Thanks @tienkietboi for the tip!

[craymichael]

Follow up for vim users - easily pretty-print the JSON in-place using the editor command

:$!python -m json.tool

[JohnLGalt]

Caveat - after reordering, any container that had sites already logged in had to relogin. But every container still works perfectly fine.

I just realized something - my caveat above _only_ applies if you change the values of the fields (such as userContextId - which I did to try to clean my list up the last time I reordered my list).

If you simply _reorder_ them _without_ changing any values within each entry, the order changes but the logins are not reset.

[kendallcorner]

Hi. This looks like a duplicate of #330 . Please vote (:+1:) or discuss on that issue to show your interest. I'll close this, but feel free to reopen if you think it's a different issue.