Show HN: Donut Browser, a Browser Orchestrator

Amazing thank you. I thought about that years ago but since I never saw anyone do it I thought something must be wrong if nobody does it.

Firefox offers multiple ways to do that: you can use containers or launch different profiles from about:profiles. The latter has no way of telling the windows apart, unfortunately. This tool seems quite handy, though.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll think how it can be added in a sane manner

Oh wow, this is a very generous offer. Thank you! It might take me a while to get the Apple Developer account to do so, not for the financial reasons. I've noted your concern and will get the app signed the moment I have a chance to do that.

I tried this before, but since I often need to open different browser even if a link came from the same app, I ended up moving to https://github.com/will-stone/browserosaurus

Not to say you cant use both tho

Thanks for sharing! This project has "automatic URL editing", which is something I'd like to add my app. Great to learn that there is a real product with this feature.

Not to distract from this but if you're primarily using Firefox I really like Container Tabs for this. With the Multi-Account Container Tabs extension, you can set a SOCKS proxy per container, then set certain origins to always open in a given container. You can even use it with Wireproxy to give tabs an individual Wireguard VPN as an exit route, though Firefox can't authenticate a SOCKS proxy so a secure setup may be challenging.

Sidenote: the Firefox VPN integration is lame. For some reason it's only possible to change the destination per container, but seemingly you can't set some containers to be on VPN and some off. I figured the value-add for Firefox VPN (e.g. over just using Mullvad) would literally be deep integration but sadly it's not very impressive. You can do better with Wireproxy.

Hope you like it! I found it a much nicer experience compared to using the Foxyproxy extension or configuring PAC files.

Not yet. I'd like to add it in the future, but it's going to be pretty time consuming as frameworks like playwright, which support both Firefox and Chromium, run a patched version of Firefox. I definitely need to learn more about the differences between it and something like Selenium, which can run both Firefox-based and Chromium-based browsers without patches.

They are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/DonutBrowser/profiles. So right now you can use something like Syncthing to synchronize the data across desktops. Once the project matures enough, I may add add end-to-end encrypted sync. If you just want to manually do it, it's as easy as copying the profile folder and the .json file with the same name.

Sorry, just saw your comment. Copying from another thread, I use it to more privately browse the web, separate my personal and professional accounts, and manage links. For example, when I open OneDrive link, I don't want it to open in my work profile. It's not a big deal, but it allows to keep personal and professional lives a little better.

Also, since the ads companies are migrating from solely using your IP and cookies for tracking to creating a comprehensive browser fingerprint, it allows you to better control what data you feed to them.

I got 5 browsers installed each has different extensions and I use browser profiles.

This could help me, once its released on linux I give it a shot

Features that make the same browser binary have a different browser fingerprint with a fresh user profile.

For example, faking location data, fonts, browser version, user agent, ssl certificates, available browser features, etc. Different anti-detect browsers offer different sets of features, but none will allow you to, say, pretend to be a Firefox user on Linux when you are a Chromium user on Windows, because it is possible to detect the engine and underlying system based on JavaScript and CSS behavior, if the website really wants to know that.

AFAIK, the most common use case for anti-detect browsers is competitive research, bypassing restrictions (not just location-based), and emulating specific user profile.

for creating mass trial account

Yes, it already does! You just need to select donut as the default browser

You can do that, yes, but if you are going to need too many profiles (Over 10, I would say), your best option is to use an anti-detect browser or something like Camoufox. If it's under 10, the application has proxy support. But outside that, there a many use cases. I use it to privately browse the web, separate my personal and professional accounts, and manage links. If you have multiple accounts and you open a random link, you have an option to select where you want to open it.