For the past several months, downloads of Firefox portable routinely fail, or take excruciatingly long to download. This occurs in either the 'automatic' update within the Portableapps platform, or if I try to download the paf.exe file directly from Sourceforge. I only seem to have this issue with the Mozilla portable apps, Firefox and/or Thunderbird. I have no issues with any other portable apps I use. Other large downloads,such as Chrome, are quick and error free. Is this a Sourceforge issue? Considering the issues with Sourceforge, and the adware, and attempts to trick you into downloading unwanted apps, is Portable Apps considering moving off Sourceforge as their repository?
New: Kanri (Oct 09, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
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Do you know what mirror you are using in the browser when you select to download? It should say at the top of the screen. Like any large open source app that uses distributed volunteer mirrors (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc) there are occasional issues with a given one that we need to report up the chain.
SourceForge has no such issues you're referring to today. The issue with them pushing out a bundleware downloader instead of an app on their mirror service as happened with GIMP occurred earlier last year and was removed within a week or so due to community pressure. Even their opt-in Dev Share bundleware program used by 12 projects (out of 400,000) to fund development of apps like FileZilla was discontinued when the new owners took over SourceForge this year. As for the download button ads, SourceForge uses Google AdSense for ads and asks that end users help report bad actors using fake download buttons in ads (which is against the AdSense terms of service but relies on publishers like us and users like you to report bad actors so Google can ban the accounts). We've had the same issue over the years with AdSense and have had to block and report several ad publishers. Unfortunately, AdSense is the biggest game in town and all the large automated ad services have these bad actors occasionally pop up.
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