Move from Classic to Plus (Simple or Classic View Only)?

Sorry to beat a dead horse and bore most of you, but would somebody please indulge a low-tech user. I haven't found any threads that directly address the following question:

What do I actually lose if I stay with the Classic fork instead of switching to the Plus fork (bearing in mind that most of the new features David has added are way over my head and probably will never be deliberately used )? Is Plus actually more secure "right out of the box?"

I've used the original Sandboxie, then David's Sandboxie Classic, since early days, and the thing I like best about it is its simplicity. Granted, you have to set up your own additional sandboxes to separate different browsers, email clients, etc., and you have to fiddle with the settings a bit to allow certain files (e.g., Firefox Preferences) out of the box, but that's about the extent of my skills and willingness to tweak...

Best regards to anyone who will take the trouble to clarify this quandary for me (and others). -- jclarkw

 

@jclarkw this is difficult to say if you add to your question that you are not into new features.... but I'll try my best to give a suitable answer.
From a security only point of view booth builds are equivalent, none is more secure than the other. This is mostly because you can configure in the sandboxie.ini of classic most plus options and they will work just fine.
From a practical standpoint, you will miss out on a UI which allows you easily to configure boxes as security hardened or on the other end of the configuration spectrum as an app compartment box. You will also miss out on the new data protection feature where boxes can only read C:\Windows, C:\Program files and the machien registry, protecting this way al user files and user registry.



That said security hardened boxes and boxes with data protection are a bit more finicky to set up, the chance that some application will have a issue is higher hence some level of trouble shooting competency is required.
Also all non default box types require a supporter certificate.

The box options dialog of sandman offers much much much more options then the old of sbiectrl, which in a way is a good thing even for a non technical user, IMHO, because this way at least you see all the things you could set.
Having just a config file even with documentation is much less intuitive, a verbose graphical interface invites to learn about new features use them and become a more advanced user, its educational.

The sandman UI is also much more easy and pleasant to use as it adheres to user expectation of how a UI should work, things are double clickable, the box options dialog does not force you to save incomplete presets, it has icons all around as optical anchors to allow users to find things they are looking for much faster without invoking OCR in their brain only pattern recognition this saves not only on afford but also on once personal CO2 emissions, LOL

The new box options menu is much more useful than the old one see yourself:


Not only it offers more options but the run menu is much more mighty the run from start menu is automatically populated with shortcuts of applications installed withing each sandbox.
And the entries beneath More Tools are fully user customizable you can create an arbitrary folder structure with any shortcuts you like

this can be done on a per box level as well as globally for all boxes.

One core functionality thing you will miss out if you don't switch to the Plus UI, are box snapshots



Technically you could somehow use them without the sandman UI but that would mean editing snapshots.ini by hand and moving files around manually so its quite impractical to do it without the UI.
Snapshots are very useful if you install software to a box and then want to test an update without risking to break the working installation.
Or in combination with box auto delete when snapshots are present auto delete instead of killing the entire box automatically rolls back to the last snapshot, so this way you can use auto clean up with software installed to the box.


And a huge lot of various large and small ui usability improvements which would take to long to list them all here.

 

Well the first start wizard offers the users to select the vintage view so I thought it would be good enough:



Also right clicking on a sandbox works in the classic view as well so i assumed people would know that mechanics...

how should I improve this further?

 

David -- Thanks VERY much for your serious consideration of my question! You've given me a small taste of what can be done in the Plus version and tempted me to learn more. I will give it a shot!

One immediate question: Can I run Classic and Plus side by side for a while, or should I remove Classic before installing Plus? (And can the Plus installation pick up my existing Classic settings on installation?)

The hardest part for a computer user without systems-programming background like me will be to learn what the new features mean and how to use them. Besides just seeing them listed in the new menus, is there a good way to develop an initial understanding of what's out there in this "brave new world?" -- jclarkw

 

When you install plus it wil ask you to uninstall classic when it does that just opt to keep the sandboxie.ini than all settings will be preserved.
The plus installation brings along the old SbieCtrl.exe i.e. the old classic UI but does not create start menu links for it, you can create those by hand and sue booth UI's
although only one can be in charge at any given time the first one to start will show you file recovery messages, etc.... the later to start will only be there and be suable but not dominant.

 

Thanks again, David!

I'll hope somebody else chimes in with guidance on how to learn the Plus GUI... -- jclarkw

 

Moved over to Plus this week. Looks great; seems to work great. After a bit of study, I was able to replace all my old shortcuts with relative ease. Your "Migration Guide" was/is a big help. Thanks for this!

Now I just have to learn what all the features (that I had never used in Classic) mean. Suggestion: Application examples would be most helpful! -- jclarkw