[Outdated] Iron Portable 6.0.475 (stable) Development Test 1

thx

Has anyone tried the "official" build on Win7 64bit? It keep crashing for me after launch, seconds after the main browser window appears.

Nevermind: I had originally "updated" a development version, apparently installing the latest version to a completely new folder makes this problem go away.

I have been using SRWare's Iron "portable" zip version. It works just fine but is self-contained. That's great for almost every app except a web browser, especially one built on Chromium.

SRWare's version writes the Cache to the Iron app directory on the USB flash. Not only does that create an excessive amount of writes but it contributes to a common problem that bogs down the browser (just Google "waiting for cache" - it has been reported on every browser built from Chromium source). I tried relocating the cache to the HDD, to a RAMdisk, and even to NUL, but moving it seemed to freak the browser out and it would just lock up for periods of time.

I downloaded IronPortable from here hoping that it would treat caching much the same way as ChromePortable but it doesn't appear that's the case.

IronPortable does create an IronPortable folder in %userprofile%\localsettings\temp and it creates etilqs_* files there but all of the files have a size of 0 bytes. I'm not sure what the function is. In the meantime, the cache is being written to \IronPortable\Data\IronPortableData\Default\Cache. Using the browser for 4-5 hours causes it to slow by 50% or more and the USB activity is off the charts.

I realize that I can add a command line switch to the INI file to change the location of the Cache but given the issues I had with SRWare's version, I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not. I will try it but also thought you might want to look at changing the location of the cache by default in a future release.

On a different note, the INI has a "cleanup if empty" section for %localappdata%\Chromium\Data. I'm not sure why but sometimes it simply creates the directory and leaves it there. I can delete it manually. What's perplexing is that it doesn't create it EVERY time.

Since the IronPortable launcher automatically sets the %TEMP% variable and automatically creates and removes %TEMP%\IronPortableTemp, you can do the following to write cache to HDD and have it automatically flushed when you close the browser.

Open IronPortable\App\AppInfo\Launcher\IronPortable.ini.

Here is how it looks by default:

[Launch]
ProgramExecutable=Iron\Iron.exe
CommandLineArguments=--user-data-dir="%PAL:DataDir%\IronPortableData" --lang=%PAL:LanguageCustom%
SingleAppInstance=false

Just add the disk cache command line switch in teh second line:

[Launch]
ProgramExecutable=Iron\Iron.exe
CommandLineArguments=--user-data-dir="%PAL:DataDir%\IronPortableData" --lang=%PAL:LanguageCustom% --disk-cache-dir="%TEMP%"
SingleAppInstance=false

[Use <pre> instead of <code> for blocks of code - mod Chris]

thx

+
When will be released Iron Portable as main branch?
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet

SRWare Iron portable is in development stage long and could be in main apps within other browsers soon I think.