In the Lab: Inside Brave Origin & Containers
We love sharing our privacy journey and writing about the tools we have adopted along the way. One tool we use every single day is the Brave browser. We have already written a couple of Privacy Tool Spotlights that explain why we chose Brave and installed it across all our devices. We are also excited about some of the new experiments Brave is working on. When something catches our attention, we test it ourselves and share our honest experience. Today we are diving into Brave Origin and Containers.
Brave Origin
Many people in the privacy community choose Brave for its strong privacy protections and support across every major platform. Some of us, including our team, prefer a cleaner setup. We often disable features we do not actively use to keep things lightweight. A number of users have even asked Brave if they could pay for a version that removes those extras from the start.
Brave listened and created Origin.
Brave Origin is a streamlined, minimalist version of Brave. It keeps the full Shields protection and the complete privacy stack while removing the revenue-focused features such as Rewards, VPN, Wallet, News, Leo AI, and similar extras. In simple terms, it is Brave with everything most privacy users normally turn off already removed.
The current one-time price is $59.99 USD. Linux users can get it for free.
Origin is currently in beta and available through the Nightly build channel. We downloaded the latest nightly build and put it through its paces. Almost everything worked exactly as expected, with just a couple of small issues.
The first hiccup is that the 1Password browser extension does not connect automatically to the 1Password desktop app. You need to sign in separately. This is similar to what happens when running Brave on Linux via Snap or Flatpak. We tried a few workarounds without success, but it is not a deal breaker for a beta product.
The second issue we ran into is that we could not log into X no matter what we tried. Again, this did not stop our testing.
Aside from those two points, everything performed perfectly. Bookmark syncing worked smoothly, and YubiKey authentication was fully supported. We liked it so much that we purchased a license to support the project, and we are looking forward to the official release.
You can find both the paid and the free Linux versions here: https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=origin
Brave Containers
Brave Containers is an experimental feature that lets you isolate cookies, site data, sessions, and logins inside separate sandboxed environments, all within a single browser profile. It was inspired by the popular Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension, which does something very similar.
Each container works like its own isolated island. Data such as cookies or local storage cannot cross between containers. This means you can log into the same website (for example, Google or Meta) with different accounts at the same time without them interfering with each other.
Containers are lighter than full browser profiles. While profiles separate everything (history, extensions, settings), containers focus specifically on session and tracking isolation. The feature is currently available in most releases, including Brave Nightly, Brave Desktop, and even Brave Origin. We are still testing on Linux, so we may have missed a few other platforms.
How to Try Brave Containers
- Open a new tab and go to
brave://flags - Search for "Containers"
- Set Enable Containers to Enabled
- Restart Brave
Once restarted, you can manage containers in two ways:
- Go to Settings and search for "Containers", or
- Right-click on any open tab and choose Open in Container → Manage Containers
Right now, the workflow is a bit awkward. You first need to open a site in a normal tab, then right-click that tab and open it in a container. We tested it with Google and Meta accounts, and it worked exactly as expected. Each account stayed properly isolated in its own container.
We are really looking forward to future improvements, especially two features we hope will arrive soon:
- Pin sites to specific containers (auto-open): The ability to set certain websites to always open in a designated container (similar to Firefox).
- Right-click to open links in containers: A quicker way to send related links into the right container.
This is still a Brave experiment, so your experience may vary. Overall, we are excited about the potential and cannot wait to see it polished into a full feature.
Constant Improvement
We love that privacy-focused products like Brave continue to evolve based on user needs and feedback. When a new feature or experiment sparks our interest, we test it and share our thoughts with you, just as we did today. We are genuinely excited about both Origin and Containers and hope they make it into a stable release soon.
If you decide to try any experiments or make configuration changes in your own browser, we recommend testing them on a backup machine or having a full backup ready to restore from. Better safe than sorry!
Remember: We may not have anything to hide, but everything to protect.
