Tag: brave

Brave Software announced that the latest version of Brave Browser supports the Containers feature now. The main idea behind it is to isolate website data. When you load a website in one container, its data and any third-party data is only accessible in that container. Think of a sandbox for sites.

Containers is not a new feature, as it was originally developed and launched by Mozilla in Firefox. The Brave integration is built-in. I had to enable the feature under chrome://flags/#containers first, but it should be available without that in the coming days.

Visit brave://settings/braveContent then to toggle “Enable Containers” there. This turns the feature on so that it is ready for use in the browser.

Like Firefox, Brave includes a set of default containers — personal, work, social and school — but you can add new containers, remove the defaults or rename them.

Once done, right-click on any link or tab and select “Open in Container”. You get the option to pick one of the existing containers and Brave highlights this with a new container icon in front of the tab and also in the address bar.

You may also right-click on the new tab icon to create a new container directly and without opening another website first.

Last but not least, you may also create temporary containers. Regular containers offer the same functionality as open tabs. Means, unless you close the sites or the container, they persist over sessions and you can restore tabs in them using restore functionality.

The main difference to temporary tabs is that they can’t be restored. When you close them, they are gone for good and tab or session restore options do not work for them.

Most modern browsers install extension updates automatically. The developers claim that this improves security, and this is true to a degree. However, automatic extension updates do open a whole new can of worms, as problematic updates do get installed automatically as well.

Consider this: when an extension gets bought, the new owner may push updates and these will get installed on user systems, often without users knowing about the change in owner. The same is true for extensions that get hijacked or when a developer introduces features that are unwanted.

Firefox is the gold standard when it comes to controlling extensions. Users of the browser can block automatic updates for extensions entirely or for specific add-ons installed in the browser.

Chromium-based browsers do not have these native capabilities. The workaround until now was to install an extension through sideloading. These bypassed the entire updating mechanics, but it also meant that the browser might show a reminder that developer extensions are running.

The most recent update of Brave Browser introduces native support to it. This sets it apart from other Chromium-based browsers, which do not offer this feature.

Here is what it does: Once enabled, Brave browser stops updating extensions in the background. You can run the update process at any time from the extensions page of the browser, which makes it comfortable compared to the sideloaded extensions bypass. The main downside is that it is an all or nothing approach, but there is a workaround.

To enable it, it is necessary to configure an experimental flag in the browser.

1. Load chrome://flags/#brave-user-extension-auto-update in the address bar.
2. Set the flag to Disabled.
3. Restart the web browser.

To update all extensions, do the following:

1. Open the Extensions page in Brave: brave://extensions/
2. Check the Developer Mode toggle at the top right corner.
3. Click on the update button that appears.

This runs the update check for all installed extensions and will download and install any update found during the process.

There is no direct option to run a check for individual extensions, it is an all-or-nothing approach. There is a workaround though, but it requires manual steps and it has disadavantages.

If you want to update a highly trusted tool (like a password manager) but want to keep a smaller utility frozen on its current version, you can manually force a single update by refreshing it.

1. Go to brave://extensions.
2. Click Remove on the specific extension you want to update.
3. Head to the Chrome Web Store, search for it, and click Add to Brave.

This installs the latest version in the browser. Note that uninstalling an extension will remove its data. Any custom configurations or personal data is removed in the process. Works best for extensions that do not have any of that.

Brave has not revealed much about the feature at this stage. Since it is experimental, there is the possibility that it will get more comfortable in the future. For now, Firefox remains the gold standard for users who want to stay in full control over extension updates.

Firefox fans have long heralded the browser’s Multi-Account Containers feature as an exclusive that users of Chromium-based browsers did not have. Soon, Brave Brower users may also make use of a Containers feature, ending Firefox’s exclusivity.

Brave has begun rolling out native Container support as an experimental flag in its desktop browser as of April 2026. It allows users of the browser to isolate web sessions better and even get options to open multiple accounts of the same site in a single browser window without using clunky workarounds or third-party extensions.

The Core Concept: Session Isolation

At its core, the Containers feature creates isolated islands within a single browser window. Each container acts as a separate, sandboxed environment. Data, including cookies, local storage, or cached files, can’t be seen or accessed by tabs in another container or by the default container-less environment.

Since data is sandboxed, it is possible to sign-in to the same site in different containers in the same browser window using a single profile, or to open a site with an account and without one at the same time. Furthermore, since data is separate, tracking becomes less effective as the trackers can only see what is going on in a single container and not the entire browser.

Containers works with tab groups and all core features of the browser, including browser extensions.

The feature is available in Brave Nightly only at the time. You need to load brave://flags, search for Enable Containers, and toggle the feature to Enabled to start using it. A restart of the browser is required as usual before it becomes available.

Since this feature is in Nightly, it may have bugs and may not be as polished as the stable version that Brave Software plans to ship in a later version of the browser.

Brave Browser is one of the few major web browsers that supports native content blocking on all supported platforms that is enabled by default. It should not come as a surprise that the browser is on an upwards trajectory when it comes to users and popularity.

While Brave is not without controversy, it is clear that Brave Software has made several meaningful strategic decisions in the past that has benefitted the business immensely.

Quick Tip: do this, if websites do not react anymore in Brave on first load.

Content blocker improvements

Brave announced today that it has improved the memory usage of its internal content blocker significantly. The company claims that it has reduce memory usage by about 75 percent, which equates to a reduction of about 45 megabytes on all supported platforms.

Brave says that users who have enabled additional filters will see an even larger reduction in memory usage going forward.

How it managed to do that? Brave explains:

..we achieved this major memory milestone by iteratively refactoring the adblock-rust engine to use FlatBuffers, a compact and efficient storage format. This architectural transition allowed us to move the roughly 100,000 adblock filters shipped by default from standard, heap-allocated Rust data structures (such as Vecs, HashMaps, and structs) into a specialized, zero-copy binary format.

Brave notes that it has implemented several optimizations in addition). These are:

• Memory management: Used stack-allocated vectors to reduce memory allocations by 19% and improved building time by ~15%.
• Matching speed: Improved filter matching performance by 13% by tokenizing common regex patterns.
• Sharing resources: Resources are shared between instantiations of adblock engines, saving ~2 MB of memory on desktop.
• Storage efficiency: Optimized internal resource storage memory by 30%.

The main memory reduction and optimizations landed in Brave 1.85 while additional optimizations will be included in the next release of the browser.

It will be interesting to see how users who have enabled additional filters in Brave benefit from the change.

Adding extra filters in Brave

It is quite easy to add more filters to Brave to extend the content blocking functionality.

Note: Each list that Brave supports natively offers a short description of what it does. Fanboy’s Anti-Newsletter list, for instance, blocks newsletter popups on websites.

1. Select Menu > Settings, or load brave://settings/ directly in the address bar.
2. Go to Shields > Content filtering.
3. Click on “show full list” to display all included filter lists.
4. Check the lists that you want to enable in Brave.

Note that adding lists will increase the memory usage of the content blocker and thus Brave. It is recommended to keep the list as short as possible.

As for recommendations, it depends largely on your Internet browsing and which annoyances you encounter regularly. YouTuber regulars, for instance, could enable filters for mobile distractions and recommendations, if they use Brave on their mobile devices.

There are also language-specific block lists, which are useful if you visit websites regularly in a specific language.