I rarely feel the need for sandboxie but the times I do, I feel that I'd be better served by a full VM. Got burned once because I misjudged risk level and the thing I ran within sandboxie managed to grab my browser's saved passwords.
Since when is Sandboxie open source?<p>edit: 2020. Awesome. I remember having to rely on reverse engineering to understand wtf it was doing. Now I can check!<p>When I was younger I wanted to start a company around automatic sandboxing very similar to Sandboxie, but dealing with Windows Kernel Drivers was miserable. Having something open source to derive inspiration and design from would have been so helpful.
Couple of previous big related threads from 2020 and 2019:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809736" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809736</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21496164" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21496164</a>
I still use it to test installers.<p>We are working on traditional Windows apps, with an installer (NSIS or Qt) and Sandboxie is a great way to test it.
During development, we can't trust that the installer won't leave a ton of crap that will break future installs, and running it under Sandboxie is a simple and effective way of starting with a clean slate every time.
Also, by inspecting the content of the sandbox, it is also possible to see what the installer has done exactly and identify what wasn't properly removed during the uninstall so that it can be fixed.
Sandboxie is pretty great. This is how I've managed to multibox Elite: Dangerous ever since Frontier changed how they issue game keys in 2019. I can have multiple versions of Steam and multiple versions of the game running side by side. The only thing that can get a little wonky is the Steam Controller, with both the desktop and game-specific bindings getting activated simultaneously in some cases.<p>I would never use it for security-sensitive process isolation, like malware analysis. It's safer to use a dedicated computer or virtual machine for that sort of thing. But for gaming? <i>chef's kiss</i>
Used it way back in my Windows 7 days, it was a great solution to keep system directories clean from all clutter that installed programs add and fail to remove during uninstall.