It says: "Whoa! Iron has crashed. Relaunch now?" But it does not help.
What do I mean by running two installs?
I installed "Iron Portable 1" and "Iron Portable 2" in two separate directories (with their respective settings). All I want to do is run them simultaneously.
I can run Chrome Portables and non-portable SRWare Irons simultaneoulsy, the problem is just with Iron Portable.
Thank you.
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No Chrome-based browsers support multiple instances. Likely never will. It's not like Firefox. It's designed to run as a single browser integrated into the OS. We do not support simultaneous instances of Chrome, Iron or Chromium.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
"No Chrome-based browsers support multiple instances. Likely never will. It's not like Firefox."
Strange. In my experience no 2 Firefoxes can run at the same time.
On the other hand, 2 SRWare Irons or Chromes run simultaneously without problem, just not two PortableIrons.
Your experiences?
[deleted]
As explained elsewhere, we specifically lock out multiple instances when apps need to have things cleaned up locally. Chrome, Firefox, etc all leave things behind, so the launchers must stick around and clean up after the bits they leave. So, multiple instances are purposely locked out. Not doing so would mean leaving bits behind or possibly binning bits from colliding instances making for a bad user experience.
There are also some apps that need to support restarts. For example, multiple instances (EXE instances) within the same instance of the app. Firefox does this as it restarts, for example. So, PAL can't just ExecWait on the instance of firefox.exe and when it's done assume all is well. It's sits around and waits for all instances of firefox.exe to be complete, THEN it closes. As such, the launcher can't handle multiple true instances as it doesn't know which is which.
Remember, your command lines you are launching those apps with does NOT make them portable. It merely points them to a specific directory for most settings. They'll still leave bits behind locally (making them decidedly non-portable). In Firefox' case, we give you the option of turning on multiple instance support using that same command line switch via an INI option, but we neither recommend nor support it. It's not designed for production use and will leave bits behind on every PC.
If an app truly supports multiple instances and doesn't leave things behind (requiring PAL to clean up its mess), then PAL *can* be set to allow multiple instances. By default, it does not. This is by design and with good reasons (as outlined above). This is documented in the PAL documentation here: https://portableapps.com/manuals/PortableApps.comLauncher/ref/launcher.i...
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks a lot, Mr. Haller. Now here's the real problem (I realized it at last) -- I had absolutely no intention of running multiple instances of ANY app -- portable or local. This issue wouldn't arise at all if Windows could differentiate between :
- Chromium and Google Chrome
- Firefox-x64, Waterfox and our good old Firefox 32-bit
So, how to make Windows realize that they are different applications ?
If PA.c recommends one-instance-per-app rule (since default=true), why does the default settings (Launcher.ini) of IronPortable say SingleAppInstance=false ? Is there a specific reason for this exception ?
We don't "recommend" one instance per app. That's the default to avoid people messing stuff up (aka, only set it to false after you understand what will be affected locally and how difference instances interact). It's also required anytime you have any registry work or moving anything onto-off of the local file system. I didn't create Iron Portable and can't speak to the decision. Looking at the IronPortable.ini and the registry entry within, it would appear that SingleAppInstance should be true and the false entry is done in error. It will be corrected in the next release.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!