I am moving a lot between home and the office and I would love to leverage Portable Chrome to be logged in to my work e-mail, calendar, chat service, and a few other sites with my work account, and then just move that USB stick to a different computer, open up my Portable Chrome, and still be logged in and have it automatically go to the exact pages I was at when I left the office.
I tried it today, moved between my work PC and went over to another PC, put in the Portable Apps USB stick, ran the Portable Apps app, opened my Portable Chrome, and _nothing_ was logged in. It didn't even remember what pages I had open and I needed to go into History to open them.
Even though I had set my Portable Chrome preferences to resume open pages on launch, it even forgot that.
So, what am I doing wrong? because I really thought that was the big feature of portable apps? To be able to take it with you, and use it wherever, and have it operate the same way, no matter what host computer it's on- because the data the app needs is stored with the app, on the USB stick, and not on the PC. Passwords, settings, history, etc.
And I apologize if this is a newbie question asked again and again.
But I consider myself fairly computer savvy and it's either not working as I thought Portable Apps were supposed to, or the Portable Apps app is missing some basic setup help to ensure that it does work like Portable Apps are supposed to.
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Chrome's settings will reset if you restore from a backup in a local install with a different user, if you move any install local/portable between PCs, if even a single byte is altered in your main Chrome's settings file, etc. This is detailed in the Google Chrome Portable installer as you install and in the app notes on its homepage here: https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable#app-notes
You must login to Google for anything to be portable. Even then, you will lose some things. This is by design of the Chrome development team and not something we can alter.
If you'd like full portability, check out Firefox Portable. We've worked with the publisher to ensure it's fully portable.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you.
I think I do want fully portable, as I want to use it home, work, on location, and have it keep its settings no matter what PC I'm on (within Win10 environments)
I was hoping for Chrome as I do video and several apps seem to offer more capability- only with chrome. But I need portability more.
Also, wasn't there a way to lock down the whole Portable thing behind a password,
to prevent someone from picking up my USB stick and essentially easily becoming me?
Or would I need one of those secure USB sticks?
I'd suggest using both Firefox and Chrome probably. That way you have maximum portability and access to Chrome exclusive stuff as needed.
I've addressed your security question here: https://portableapps.com/comment/247077#comment-247077
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!