One way I avoided mixing up accounts was by keeping three Chrome windows open: one for work, one for personal matters, and one for everything else. This was a slow and messy setup, and occasionally, I caught myself sending an email from the wrong inbox. Container extensions helped, but Brave recently added native containers.

I’ve been using them since they were introduced, and they’ve replaced the multiple Chrome windows I used to keep open. It’s the one feature that makes me feel I can retire Chrome as a daily browser.

One browser window, four separate people

The default containers mapped onto every account I already use

I’ve been using Brave’s native containers since they were introduced in version 1.92 just over a month ago. Within this period, my workflow became drastically more organized. I have a work Google account open on one tab, the next tab contains my personal account, and neither interferes with the other. I didn’t need a second browser, extension, or window; neither did I use a second profile nor log out of one account to check the other.

I had to navigate to Settings -> Content -> Containers and toggle Enable Containers on, but once I did, I was presented with four container options: Personal, Work, Social, and School. These can be renamed or deleted, and you can even build new containers that better suit your needs.

It follows a similar approach to Firefox, which also natively includes this feature. You can right-click a tab to open the Open a container option; right-clickingthe new tab icon also gives you the Container options. Once in a container, even when I opened a link, I stayed within the container. While it may seem minor, this is something I’ve seen break in other container implementations, especially with extensions.

At that point, my client account remained in my Work container, while Personal held my own logins. I kept accounts I didn’t fully trust with my data in the Social container, and now I can seamlessly have two logged-in versions on a single site open at once.

The wrong inbox reply that never happened again

Exactly the kind of mistake multiple windows used to guarantee

Before switching to the native containers, I had sent emails from the wrong accounts a few times. Occasionally I was lucky enough to hit Undo just in time, but sometimes I only realized when the reply came back. It feels like a small error until you mistakenly post from a client’s social media account instead of yours.

Honestly, these errors are the predictable cost of running multiple identities through a browser that is designed to support only one account per profile. The mistakes still happen when you have separate windows because they look the same at a glance. Separate profiles help, but they don’t eliminate the friction of switching between them, which requires an extra step before you can do what you really want to do.

With native containers, Brave took away what used to be guesswork. The containers are color-coded and labeled, which gives a visual cue even before you click. I stopped double-checking, and as minor as that feels, it’s been a big behavioral shift.

Brave insists this isn’t a privacy feature

That’s exactly what makes it solve a different problem than Firefox ever did

I was initially surprised that Brave explicitly framed Containers as not being a privacy feature. But it made sense because, before introducing Containers, Brave “isolates each site and its third-party requests so that trackers can’t follow you across the Web.” Since Brave wasn’t trying to fill a gap in cross-site tracking with Containers, the feature is purely for convenience.

This is a real distinction from Firefox containers, where the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension serves two roles: stopping sites from tracking you across tabs and allowing you to separate accounts.

The drawback of the container feature, however, is that it’s desktop-only on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It doesn’t have as many features as Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers extension, which has existed for years, but it still covers the basics. I spin up a “New temporary container” for accounts or sites where I’m not willing to commit to a specific container, and it’s the most organized account setup I’ve experienced natively in a browser.

This was the last reason Chrome still felt necessary

Brave is the only Chromium browser that I still trust. Its built-in ad blocking and tracker protection have always been strong reasons to switch. However, it was the boring, practical tax of running more than one identity through a single browser that kept pulling me back to Chrome.

Native containers in Brave have eliminated this tax. After a month of using them, the other features I already liked about Brave went from nice-to-haves to a complete case for switching. If I didn’t need a second browser open to stay logged into a specific account, then I didn’t really need Chrome.

As strange as it is, I started using Brave for privacy, but the one thing that eventually won me over had nothing to do with it.