I just started up Firefox portable ESR and noticed that sync wasn't working after further investigation it seems it's respecting group policy and it's writing to the registry. If it's doing that then I don't see what the point of it it? It's not a portable app. It should only write settings locally to the same directory and never to the registry. It should not respect GPO policies, Intune, etc.
New: DesktopSnowOK (Jan 6, 2025), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
No Ads Nov/Dec/Jan!, Please donate today
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on Twitter
We don't change the apps we release. If the app gives us a way to redirect settings, registry, and/or other data to the app's folder, we use it.
But if the app doesn't give us a way to do that (which is a lot of apps), we handle putting the app's settings where they are supposed to go before launch, and then clean them up again after close so they always live in the app's folder when it is not running.
Are there ways to redirect/virtualise the registry? Yes, there are, but they rarely work properly, so we don't even try to use them.
The only other way to do what you are expecting would be to change each base app to not use the registry and to allow redirecting settings, which is asking for a lot more than the developer resources we have to work with would allow.
I created an account to reply, the comment regarding registry and what not, this reminded me of sand boxie, as it does just this.
Obviously, portable apps already save the appdata locally, so saying to set appdata=%~dp0 would be too much.
But anyways, I agree for the most part, if an application is hard coded to save to documents folder, it would be like a game of wack-a-mole trying to support most applications. However, I imagine firefox is one of those applications that are likely downloaded and used by many portableapp users?
Finally, Firefox is an open source cross-platform app, so saying that there are registry issues seems like a blanket statement to dismiss the OP's concern.
I was talking about apps in general, not just Firefox specifically when I said that.
But the point stands that we simply don't have the developer resources to modify apps like that.
maybe, but I disagree
I created a feature request for firefox
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/windows-registry-opt-out-for-firefo...
Now, if those devs disagree, you can say we did everything we could.
If the Firefox devs do agree I'd be very surprised.
Any user-accessible way to bypass the registry would block the browser from being used anywhere that group policies are needed like schools, larger corporations, etc.
Also your link is not publicly accessible, it just shows "Idea not found", so we can't actually follow along with what happens there.
would be nice if apps would did it,
i cross fingers!
hope you get it public accessible and positive feedback!
help were i can. maybe you can help me too. threads in account/track.
if you don't want to help don't post crap!
what's op?
it's propably not hard to let it to choose by user where to save sttings but seem not to think of pro, portable or ... users.
help were i can. maybe you can help me too. threads in account/track.
if you don't want to help don't post crap!
OP = original poster, sorry for my usage of acronym.