A very common use case for product demonstrations, development reviews, testing or training sessions is to switch between different users to demonstrate or test how different roles interact with the system.

One feature that helps you achieve this is the impersonation mechanics, which allows to quickly switch between different roles, but it has a bit of overhead and you lose the current context you are working in. Another way people have been approaching this issue is by having either multiple browsers open at the same time where they are logged in with different users, or using the "private" browsing feature of modern browsers.

Today I am going to show you a more elegant way of being logged in with multiple different users simultaneously using the new Quantum version of Firefox (download link below).

With the new Firefox release, you will be able to create so called Tab Containers that are tied to a user session. All container tabs that belong to one container will be marked with a different color / symbol, see the below screenshot.

By default, you are going to have a few predefined containers (personal, work, banking, shopping), but it's easy to set up new containers for new roles (for example, problem manager, admin, end user etc.).

Now, you can open container tabs, navigate to your instance and log in with the roles you need for your work. You could also log in with your admin user and then impersonate the target user, but I actually recommend logging in with the target user's username and password, if that is an option. That way, you won't have to worry about the timeout of impersonations and can keep the session open pretty much indefinitely.

To open a new tab with the given profile, simply use the New Container Tab functionality.

If you have already logged in to the target instance, the container will remember it, so you won't have to log in again. You can also duplicate existing container tabs if you want to work with multiple tabs per role.

So that's it. I recommend giving the new version of Firefox a try. At this point, Quantum is still in Beta, but you can already download it here:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/

Some more background info on this new feature: Security/Contextual Identity Project/Containers - MozillaWiki