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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Not entirely related, but is there a simple way to run an application like a web browser in a sandbox on Windows? Sometimes I find myself wanting to install a dodgy extension or software, but I don't know how to test it safely without using something like virtual box as a sandboxed enviroment. I kinda want something where I can just right-click an .exe and run it in a sandbox.

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Have you tried Windows Sandbox (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro...)?

I really liked Windows Sandbox when I used it. My only complaint was I could no longer use VirtualBox (I guess because Windows was acting as a hypervisor).

Do you know if this limitation has since been removed? I know there was work on it, but I don't know how that turned out.

VirtualBox can perform under HyperV nowadays, although it performs less well.

This has been my main limitation on using... about half a dozen neat Windows virtualization features. I wasn't willing to give up... every... other virtualization tech to have the Hyper-V feature installed.

Hoping the other child comment is right and that there's been some improvement in this space.

There is actually an app that I used to setup for people years and years ago that did this. Recently they went fully open source. Pretty neat little piece of software.

https://github.com/sandboxie/sandboxie

Don't trust it? Don't run it.

Run it in a sandbox all you want manually, you'll still have no idea what it's really doing. It could be the safest looking thing ever, that's not really going to tell you much.

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