That was also my story and I abandoned containers that time. But it turns out to be more about bad default UI.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
I just ended up with mounds of rules about what to open in the same container vs not, what urls to force in a given container, etc.
I still want to like them, but TBH, I don't miss them in Vivaldi.
Totally willing to accept I was doing containers wrong, I guess, but in that case, I don't know what "right" would've looked like.