Chrome portable - my experience

1. Chrome per se cannot auto-update as the required Google update service is not installed (for obvious reasons). Instead, install the Portable Apps Platform application, which allows you to install/uninstall AND automatically update portable apps as necessary. Add a shortcut to it in your Start menu and you're good to go.

2. Chrome is a memory guzzler as it (by default) runs a new process per tab. To decrease its memory footprint (e.g., on systems with up to 2 GB of RAM) you can start the non-portable Chrome application using command line option --process-per-site. To use this option with Chrome portable you need to first copy file GoogleChromePortable.ini from folder Other\Source to the folder where GoogleChromePortable.exe sits and then append the option to the line that begins with AdditionalParameters=

3. To start Chrome portable in incognito mode by default you can add option --incognito as an additional parameter, as shown above. For example, here is what I use: AdditionalParameters= --process-per-site --incognito

4. Chrome portable will auto-update the installed extensions no matter how hard you try to stop it from doing so. I suppose this is for security purposes but in my case I just wanted to roll-back an extension which had "temporarily" disabled some of the features I was really interested in. So I had to uninstall the extension.