I have a general question about browsers that include built-in ad and tracker blocking. Brave Browser is often mentioned because it has native ad blocking and tracker protection without requiring extensions. I was wondering how PortableApps.com generally views browsers with built-in privacy features like this.
Recently I also came across Kahf Browser, which focuses on privacy and includes built-in ad and tracker blocking as well. From a user perspective, both seem similar in concept, though implemented differently.
My questions are:
- Are built-in ad/tracker blockers (like in Brave) considered a positive or negative from a portability standpoint?
- Do such features create additional challenges for making a browser truly portable?
- Are Chromium-based browsers with privacy features harder to support in portable environments compared to others?
I’m asking purely from a user and technical curiosity point of view, not requesting an app addition.
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Neither positive nor negative, really.
They are just software features, and most software features do not affect portability directly. It is all about how those features are designed and coded, not the purpose or intent of the features themselves.
Software is either:
Chromium is case #2 I listed above: designed to not be portable. It has some features and flags that are designed for portability (like a command line switch to move the user data dir), but then it has things like if you put it in Program Files it will ignore those portability settings. It also locks your install to a single PC by encrypting passwords and some other user data with a key that is unique to the computer. You can disable it, but then your passwords are stored as plain text.
And unfortunately one of the biggest and easiest privacy improvements that can be made to Chromium (removing the browser-level Google login) makes it almost impossible to make portable.
We have a standard of not adding any new Chromium-based browsers to the catalog unless Chromium or the individual browser does some significant work to make portability easier. That is the primary reason we don't have a release of Brave.