Not require admin privileges to install?
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That makes no difference… I still only see a 12.4MB file called setup.exe (tried with both packers available to me on this PC). There is another 23MB of data "hidden" in that installation file...
Then just use a decent/updated unzipper, as I said 7zip and winrar are working perfectly for the purpose, as they used to since opera switched to this kind of installer, say 7/8 years ago.
I already said several times that these are work PCs where I have NO ADMIN RIGHTS, so other packers are not (easily) available to me.
If I had the rights then I wouldn't need to try and unzip them would I !?!
(I would just bloody install it…) -
Thanks, but my point really was that the portable version should be easier to install. It's less trouble to do an update on my wife's profile at home than use an extra packer solely for the purpose of updating Vivaldi at work.
I know the standalone install has been mentioned before, but I thought of these (IMO) improvements wrt. the current thread, so why not discuss it here?
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for portable install - sure
for proper install - no way! (I'm not sure if it's even possible but if so - don't do it)I was clearly describing PORTABLE installation, mentioned several times
even this installations might be restricted (requiring admin rights) AFAIK (sorry if you told something different and I'm wrong)
With all respect, I react to the OP. Portable don't has to be an installation but might be (depends of distribution) so that's why I write about it as well.
I was more focusing about the "DO require admin rights for proper install". If you still disagree just do not let me know and keep it for yourself thanks
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Thanks, but my point really was that the portable version should be easier to install.
Portable is something that is not yet provided by the the installer (you need to do it manually ATM)
Stand alone and single user shouldn't require the admin rights to be installed
The only option that must ask for admin rights is the All Users one.
The actual scenario is little different, and the installer may ask for righs even when it shouldn't.
That said is pretty easy to workaround the problem, and I explained how.
I already said several times that these are work PCs where I have NO ADMIN RIGHTS, so other packers are not (easily) available to me.
And I suggested, at least once, to use some mental elasticity.
What made you think that you can use a whole browser w/o the admin rights, but not a stupid unzipper?
Just use a portable version of 7zip.
Alternatively unpack the installer where you can and then recompress it as a plain zip, then put it on a pendrive or on a cloud drive or on a filelocker, to make it ready to install on your wife's PC.
Pretty easy.
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Sorry The_Solutor, but you still don't get what I'm saying:
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I use my wife's profile on my home PC to install the standalone Vivaldi on the USB stick (because it doesn't work from my own profile (it will try to update my main copy of Vivaldi on the PC))
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then I run Vivaldi from USB on work PCs where I do not have admin rights and do not want to leave any data or programs
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if there's a new version of Vivaldi while I'm at work I can't update it there so I just wait until I'm home again
I am not desperate to update it at work, I don't want to bother with unnecessary copies of 7zip etc…. I was just saying that it would be better if Vivaldi could update itself on the USB without admin rights, since that's convenient and since it should be able to do that anyway, in my opinion!
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Sorry The_Solutor, but you still don't get what I'm saying:
I got perfectly what are you saying, is pretty obvious that the installer needs refinements like the whole browser.
It was discussed over and over, and I'm sure it will be fixed in the near future.
That said we are talking about a solution to help the people that have your problem.
And the solution IS PRETTY EASY to accomplish.
Then is up to you to decide if use it or keep the browser not updated.
Surely is not a my understanding problem.
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And some other points concerning portable installation:
- at the moment, the stp.viv file will point to a drive letter which may be incorrect if the USB stick is used on different machines
Just curious whether you've tried the relative path option in the stp.viv file? (see discussion here) I think (but haven't tested thoroughly) this would eliminate any drive letter problems on different machines.
- running on USB stick is very slow due to caching etc. - for this reason I tend to delete stp.viv and let Vivaldi use the local profile instead…
Yes, in my very limited experience so far, it is very slow!!!! Not even remotely usable (e.g., 5 minutes or more to pull up the history list from the Speed Dial page; but also very slow loading web pages, which seems odd to me… ...I regularly use Olde Opera on a USB stick and most of the time I don't notice any slowdown at all... ...but I'm having some other problems on the machine I tested the Vivaldi USB stick on and I'm not 100% sure those aren't causing some slowdowns as well).
Interesting workaround using a local cache with your USB stick. (I'm thinking that probably wouldn't work with the relative path in the stp.viv file, though.)
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Just curious whether you've tried the relative path option in the stp.viv file? (see discussion here) I think (but haven't tested thoroughly) this would eliminate any drive letter problems on different machines.
I was thinking about it, but since it was so slow anyway I had already decided to let the program run off USB with the user data held temporarily on the local disk.
Interesting workaround using a local cache with your USB stick. (I'm thinking that probably wouldn't work with the relative path in the stp.viv file, though.)
Exactly. And that's why I was thinking that Vivaldi could have a system where USB installs use the %TEMP% area for user data, which would then be stored as a zip file on the USB stick on program shutdown.
I think the Chromium engine does a lot more disk writing than Presto did: more files and they seem to be much bigger as well. (Gut feeling, I haven't really looked into it much - but when I synchronise the zip file each evening it is packing a few hundred megabytes for one day's simple browsing of a handful of sites, which seems a lot).
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I think the Chromium engine does a lot more disk writing than Presto did: more files and they seem to be much bigger as well. (Gut feeling, I haven't really looked into it much - but when I synchronise the zip file each evening it is packing a few hundred megabytes for one day's simple browsing of a handful of sites, which seems a lot).
Yes, I was thinking I might try finding a portable Chrome option or try a Standalone Chropera installation on a USB stick to compare speed.
But I was sort of hoping someone might come along here who has already tried those options, as I already can't keep up with everything I want to check out just with Vivaldi.
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Yes, I was thinking I might try finding a portable Chrome option or try a Standalone Chropera installation on a USB stick to compare speed.
Chromium and derivatives aren't friendly with slow storage devices, no matter what flavour you are going to use.
Likely you can find better performance using an NTFS formatted pendrive and enabling the FS compression
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But I was sort of hoping someone might come along here who has already tried those options, as I already can't keep up with everything I want to check out just with Vivaldi.
Oh, yes, I forgot that I meant to come back here and mention that tardigrada posted some somewhat encouraging portable Chrome and portable Chropera results here.
Likely you can find better performance using an NTFS formatted pendrive and enabling the FS compression
Have you compared speed for any chromium derivative on FAT32 vs NTFS? If so, how much difference did there seem to be?
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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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