I've been wondering ever since this site started why you only support Microsoft Windows (and I've finally bothered to get myself a forum account). Thanks for offering a great service BTW.
It would really be useful, for Portable Apps where this is possible, to have an archive that includes the binaries for MSW, GNU/Linux and MacOS with shared settings.
As an example, I've done this with Thunderbird since version 0.1 (by manually extracting the binaries for each OS). It is really useful if you want to download you e-mail at an Internet cafe or somewhere to access from an offline machine running a different OS.
Maybe this is considered outside the remit of this project. However, when I searched these fora I did find an old post by John Haller saying that he was considering doing this for Firefox.
On a related point, could the Portable App homepages state which versions of MS Windows are supported?
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
1. There has been barely any developer interest in supporting other OSes with the exception of one Mac user group that's been doing mac-only portable apps.
2. Nearly every machine people encounter is Windows. The only exception being their home machine for some folks (in which case they have all their apps on that machine already). Or, in rare instances, their work machine. Everything else... libraries, net cafes, school computer centers, hotel business centers, friends houses, parents hourses, etc etc... it's all Windows. Over 95% of the computers in the world are Windows. Something like 4% of all online computers are Macs. And way less than 1% is Linux.
In answer to which Windows version, that's posted on every single apps' page. The answer is, ALL modern versions of Windows are supported -- from Windows 95 up through Windows Vista -- unless the app itself doesn't support a given OS. Firefox, for instance, no longer runs on Win95. Sunbird dropped support for everything before Windows 2000. The PortableApps.com foundation (Menu, Backup, etc) is made to work on Windows 95 and up and under Wine within Linux/Unix/Intel Mac.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the prompt response. I meant stating what OS the app itself supports as some users might not know this and they are likely to want to use the portable version on a range of MSW versions (e.g.: suggest that users get Portable Kmeleon instead of Firefox if they want to run their browser on MSW 95 or reliably run on MSW 98).
It is mainly with Thunderbird that I thought the cross-platform thing would be useful, and maybe Firefox. If it will take up too much space on the server or time to mantain, maybe it could be mentioned on your website that it is possible to extract binaries for another OS to a USB drive with Thunderbird and then install PortableThunderbird over these to achieve cross-platform e-mail. I think this also works with Firefox.
If you check each apps' page, it states quite clearly in the Download Details section which OSes each app is compatible with. It'll even say if it works in Wine and, if so, what issues there are. For example:
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable#download_details
Suggesting alternatives isn't a high priority as Win9x machines are very few and far between these days. And there's no solid portable version of KMeleon (there are like 5 different ones, all with different issues and none are in PortableApps.com Format so your settings won't get backed up).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for that. Sorry; I obviously hadn't bothered scrolling down to the bottom.
I've found the application compatibility page now which is really what I was looking for.
[Moderator RM: Links are in the following format: <a href="link">text</a>, make sure you don't forget the quotation marks. I fixed for you]