YouTube Container is a free extension for the Firefox web browser that isolates YouTube domains that you open in the web browser from the rest to improve privacy.

The extension is a fork of Facebook Containers, an official extension for Firefox by Mozilla that isolates Facebook from the rest of the browsing activity to improve user privacy and limit tracking.

Note: Just like Facebook Containers, YouTube Containers requests access to data for all websites even though it appears to be active only on select YouTube domains.

Firefox's container functionality is a relatively new feature of the browser. Containers isolate sites loaded in the container from the rest of the browser. Isolate means that Firefox separates storage for cookies, temporary Internet files and other data; this improves privacy as it limits tracking capabilities. Another benefit is that you can open a site multiple times in the browser and sign in using different accounts.

Youtube Container is a fork from facebook container that isolates your Youtube activity from the rest of your web activity in order to prevent Youtube from tracking you outside of the Youtube website via third party cookies.

YouTube Container

YouTube Container loads youtube.com domains in a separate container. The container is started when you load YouTube for the first time or click on a link that leads to YouTube.

Firefox highlights the use of a container in the address bar and by underlining the tab.

The container isolates YouTube cookies and other data from the rest of the browser to limit tracking. Note that the container is used only when YouTube is opened directly in the web browser but not if YouTube content is embedded on third-party sites.

In other words, any YouTube video that is embedded on a third-party site is not loaded in the container.

Closing Words

I predict that we will see more specialized container extensions that keep a specific site isolated from the rest of the browser. This could get out of hand quickly considering that you'd like to isolate other sites, e.g. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, as well.

The Temporary Containers extension for Firefox may be an option for some as it can be used to assign URLs to the same or different containers. It is not an install and forget about it type of extension though as it requires manual configuration.

If you are particularly worried about YouTube (Google) tracking you, YouTube Containers may be an extension that you could use to limit that tracking.