How to Open Links in Firefox Containers

Doug Slater Doug  ·  2026-01-03

If you use multiple accounts for the same service (work and personal Gmail, for example), you've probably run into this: you click a link and it opens in the wrong account. Or you have to keep logging in and out. Or your work and personal tabs are mixed together, making it hard to find what you need.

Firefox's Multi-Account Containers feature solves this by isolating browsing contexts. Cookies and site data stay separate between containers, so you can be logged into multiple accounts simultaneously.

With Linklever and a third-party extension, you can automatically route links to specific containers based on rules. Click a work link anywhere on your computer, and it opens in your Work container without any extra steps.

What You Need

  1. Firefox with the Multi-Account Containers extension
  2. The open-url-in-container extension
  3. Linklever (version 0.57.0 or later)

Note: The open-url-in-container extension is a third-party project not developed by EnduraByte. Use it at your own discretion.

How It Works

The open-url-in-container extension registers a custom protocol. When Firefox opens a URL like ext+container:name=Work&url=https://example.com, the extension opens the URL in the container named "Work".

Linklever can pass arguments to browsers. With the URL placeholder feature (available in version 0.57.0), you can include parts of the URL in those arguments. This allows you to set up a custom browser entry that passes the special URL format to Firefox.

Step 1: Create a container in Firefox called "Work" if you don't have one already. Click the Multi-Account Containers icon and create a new container.

Step 2: In Linklever's Apps tab, add a custom app. Set the path to Firefox and add this argument:

ext+container:name=Work&url={url}

Example on macOS:

Step 3: In the Rules tab, add a rule to route Office URLs to your new Firefox entry:

Now when you click an Office link anywhere on your computer, it opens in Firefox in the Work container.

Container Names with Spaces

If your container name has spaces, replace them with %20. For example, a container called "My Work" would be:

ext+container:name=My%20Work&url={url}

More About URL Placeholders

The {url} placeholder used above is part of a broader feature. You can use placeholders for any part of the URL, for example the host, path, or query string. This lets you do things like strip tracking parameters or build custom URL formats for other tools.

See the Browsers guide for the full list of placeholders and more examples.

Your Turn

Consider setting up containers for contexts you want to keep separate: banking, social media, shopping, or client work.

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