Not require admin privileges to install?
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Have you compared speed for any chromium derivative on FAT32 vs NTFS? If so, how much difference did there seem to be?
I never used a portable browser in my life, but I have a good experience in live distros and I've compared the performances of the endelss combinations of operating systems, file systems and cluster sizes.
Usually Fat32 is faster than NTFS and slower than Fat16, because the overhead of permissions, ownrership and so on.
But that's true for plain NTFS. I suggested purposely to experiment with compressed NTFS. Comprssion means veeeeery liiiiittle CPU power involved on nowadays computers, but means (roughly) one half of the data transferred, read and written.
The result is that on fast media like an SSD you lose nothing in performance (often you have a gain), but you will gain one half of the space for free.
On the other hand, on slow media (or on media connected via a slow lane, like the USB20 you will get a performance improvement given the halved data.
In linux the matter is even more complicated given the huge amount of available filesystems and tuning parameters.
In my experience the best options are the F2FS filesystem (developed by Samsung with the flash media in mind) which is uncompressed, and BTRFS that supports the on the fly compression, just like NTFS, and also some optimizations for flash media (both must be explicitly enabled).
There is also a third way, the one used mostly by the live distros where two filesystems are overlaid. One is compressed and write only (Squashfs), to store the binaries (the application folder in our case case) and the other is read/write capable (the user profile in our case).
In short ,only real world experiments can give a definite answer to your question, and the results are variable accordingly to the flash media taken in account.
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@The_Solutor: That's a nice, really well written overview of a complex topic!
It touched on everything I know about the issues from the Windows side, plus the Linux stuff and the two filesystems overlaid in some live distros that I know next to nothing about… ...and did it very succinctly!
I thought NTFS would be a little slower than FAT32, but figured you were thinking the NTFS compression might more than make up for that. Makes sense as a working hypothesis. ...But yes, it sounds like someone will have to try it to find out for sure.
It will probably be a while before I get around to NTFS formatting a USB stick to try it out (if ever), as I really don't ever use a portable browser. I'm more interested in it in a theoretical way, and to help out other users who might need a portable installation, so I appreciate the suggestion.
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@The_Solutor: That's a nice, really well written overview of a complex topic!
Given my poor English I take it as an huge compliment. :woohoo:
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Honestly, when I read it, I thought "Wow, that's the clearest, most grammatically/syntactically correct English post of yours***** that I've seen." If it was the only one I had ever read, I doubt I would have guessed English isn't your native language.
*Edit: I've seen some Italian ones, but I can't read them.
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I have the same problem at workplace. Although I can install it in the Virtual PC, but if I copy the folder, I lose the settings and extensions.
Opera can be installed without admin rights, too. (Offline install)
[EDIT] Here I've found a solution for this problem.
But remains the problem: I can't update this way. But if I install it on a computer with admin rights, I can packed copy it to the "limited right" computer. And I don't lose the settings. -
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