There are multiple copies of Chrome portable I need to regularly update within my househould. Even though we have fast internet, the online updater is often very slow. And having to deal with that on multiple PCs with every single update is becoming an annoying time sink. Is there any way to get an offline version like Firefox?
Repackaging Chrome is prohibited by its license and would be illegal. The small download is from us (Google Chrome Portable installer is around 1MB). The larger download (Chrome installer of around 107MB) is directly from Google's servers. They serve me at about 26MB/s.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
For whatever reason, when I update Chrome portable, the downloads usually only average ~2MB/s and very rarely even reach 5MB/s... which is a fraction of my internet speed everywhere else. I feared the online updating was required by Google but wanted to raise this issue (since I know others who also suffer with this same problem) in case there was some workaround. For example, would it be possible to point the updater to multiple different Chrome portable folders (on the local PC and on the LAN) such that it could download the update only once and apply it simultaneously to those multiple folders?
Not currently, but a local cache on a shared drive is something I'd like to add at some point. It would work for all apps updated via the PA.c Platform with access to a shared folder containing the cached files.
For right now, if you're experiencing slow speeds, install Google Chrome Portable on the first PC. Then open up the App\AppInfo folder and the installer.ini directory. You'll see an entry for DownloadURL. Download that file and place it in the same directory as the Google Chrome Portable installer. As long as the filename and SHA256 match, it'll use the local copy rather than downloading when you run it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the tip. I'll try it with the next update.