Brave Adds Containers to Separate Your Browsing

Brave has released a new containers feature to allow you to isolate your browsing between different identities.

The feature is comparable to the Multi-Account Containers feature in Firefox, although that requires an additional extension while Brave Containers are built-in.

Brave already isolates different sites from each other via storage partitioning, but with containers, you can be logged in to different accounts on the same site without having to switch browser profiles. It can also help you organize your browsing around specific activities i.e. work, shopping, general browsing, etc.

To use containers, go to the Settings under Content and click Enable Containers. If your browser doesn't have that option yet, you can click the hamburger menu at the top right, click Help, click About Brave, and check that you have the latest version installed.

If you've been using different browser profiles in Brave to separate your online identities while browsing, containers are a much smoother user experience and let you combine tabs from multiple containers together in the same window.

When you need to open a link in a specific container, you can right-click and open new tabs in a specific container. You should color-code them so you can easily tell them apart and don't accidentally "cross the streams."

You can also open temporary containers that will delete itself once all tabs inside it are closed, clearing all browsing data, sort of like a private browsing mode that you can intersperse with your other tabs.

Be aware that some data is shared between containers, specifically

• Extensions
• Autofill information including credit card details
• Settings, Shields, site settings, permissions
• Passwords
• History

The shared information is part of the benefit of containers: you don't have to set up your browser again for every new identity you make.

A similar feature also exists in Safari via Profiles,. It's bizarre that Firefox requires an extension to use this feature, even though it came out years ago.

These are the only three browsers I know of that support this feature. If you tend to always run your browser in private browsing mode, it might be time to give containers a try so you don't have to log in to your accounts over and over again. Just make sure you decide what accounts belong to which identities.