Portable version of Brave browser

[bsclifton]

Carried over from brave/browser-laptop#2953

I had been looking for Firefox and later Chromium binaries so that I could place them on a USB stick\hard drive and move my browser with me (portability). However, I never found them.

I was pleasantly surprised to see brave raw binaries available for Linux.

I would like to suggest the following:

• Have binaries for all platforms available always - a USB stick\hard drive formatted using NTFS can store both Linux and Windows binaries and help the user achieve greater portability
• Make the binaries collection\archive\compressed file self-sufficient. That is, either they have no external dependencies or the dependencies are well-documented
• If possible, make portable brave upgrade itself - Tor browser (based on Firefox) already does this:

[caspertone2003]

Wish to point to two facts

• if possible, should be possible to run it without priviledges (in windows, not admin rights)
• truly portable (not as it happens with chrome that binds the portable to the machine). so, passwords, and other elements (bookmarks, extension configuration, etc) are not machine dependent...

Thanks

[crazy-max]

Hi guys, I'm the developer of brave-portable from Portapps.
Indeed, to make it truly portable, like every Chrome based browsers if I'm not mistaken, we have to deal with machine fingerprints.

[crazy-max]

I created a portable release of brave 0.55.20. For the moment some restrictions do not allow to make the application completely portable. I explain it briefly on portapps/brave-portable#4. I will try to work on patches for chromium and add a switch to brave-core to get a full portable version. If some people can contribute to the brave-core repository to manage these problems I would be happy to participate.

[crazy-max]

Ok after applying a patch on Chromium and doing several tests on machines (Win7, 8.1, 10) I managed to set up portability. This allows the portability of everything, except certificates. I will create a PR on brave-core and a switch to enable/disable this behavior.

[dimuththarindu]

I'm an Opera user and the only reason I'm using it because they offer a portable version (64bit).

[adrianmak]

Opera has already been a China product

[crazy-max]

Give it a try : https://portapps.github.io/news/2019-01-31-brave-portable-0.61.5-45/

[ghost]

Thank you so much, @crazy-max, for your valuable work. Your solution for Brave works flawlessly.

I hope your team keeps coming up with new releases.

[crazy-max]

@Badum-Tiss I'm a "one-man army" on Portapps but yeah I will follow the updates.

[ghost]

@crazy-max I could help if and when there's a need.

I don't know much about Chromium's code however.