Hacker News Reader

Comment by revanx_ | Hacker News Reader

This is not a sandbox. All this does is launch windows in hyper-v virtual machine and configures the virtual environment automatically for you.

You could achieve all of this yourself manually and you still wouldn't call it a sandbox, you would call it VM.

View on HN

You can say you get the same result, yes. However this does it in a very different way. It's linking to the host OS's OS. It's not a VHD with a separate windows installation. That makes it quite a bit more lightweight. You don't have to patch it separately, etc. When installed, the sandbox image is only 100mb, mostly immutable links to host OS files.

I agree, it is not the same sandbox as for example, browser sandboxes which restrict capabilities for multiple tabs to a given set of resources. However, its closer to KVM or Docker than to VirtualBox. The host and the 'guest' appear to be much more tightly integrated than in a full virtualized environment.

All vm's are sandboxes I suppose. The interesting difference between this and a normal VM is that the files are shared so that it's not using the space of a full VM.

Can't you use a VM as a sandbox?

Sure, I just don't think they should advertise this as such because it's nothing more then a VM. It's not some new windows feature, you could do this same thing since Windows 8.1 using hyper-V or since windows XP using something like Virtualbox.

A proper sandbox would be if you could run a program in the same operating system with an isolated execution environment, similar to how sandboxie does it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com