Moonchild Productions subfolder in Roaming...

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newPMuser

Moonchild Productions subfolder in Roaming...

Unread post by newPMuser » 2018-06-06, 13:54

Hi,

An actual portable app. should not create neither leave ANY data, including if not above all: empty folders, in the user folder, i.e. (Win. 10) %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\

PM 27.9.2 (64-bit) & other versions (32-bit) do create an empty "Moonchild Productions" subfolder in "Roaming" -- and leave it there afterwards.

This (2013...) reply viewtopic.php?t=2323 explains that "Palemoon is portable, not 'stealth'".

I find it annoying, especially in PCs that I don't own of course and, moreover, in companies PCs, notably paranoid: where the administrator(s) will NOT allow any data creation outside whatever 'portable' app. folder is run (if many users never encounter that situation, I sure have!).

So, as requested in the old 2013 post, I would ALSO like PM to be (or become) 100% portable / of course, I have read the answer: "underlying Mozilla code (that) creates a vendor & application folder in AppData whenever a Firefox-based app. is launched"...

... and haven't tried -- yet -- to "virtualize" Palemoon by myself, using e.g. "Cameyo", may be?

So far, all I've been able to do is adding the following line

DirRemove=%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Moonch~1

to the [RunAfter] section, in "Palemoon-Portable.ini" -- so that the "Moonchild Productions" subfolder gets deleted from "Roaming"; BUT, (as expected) only after closing Palemoon...

... which is yet NOT ("stealth") enough to meet companies admins' requirements / restrictions.

About the fact that "Windows creates + keeps traces of anything that was run anyway", I won't comment much:

obviously, any OS needs to be aware of what the user executes -- although we know (more or less) to which point Microsoft spies on everything: way too much, keeping such info. too long, etc.; thus forcing the user to use "CCleaner" or else (while trying to discourage its use, in Win. 10...);

but those chunks of data are activity records, not the unwanted subfolder in question, neither new registry entries -- that PM does not seem to create, BTW (haven't checked on that, yet).

Regards,
newPMuser

Fedor2

Re: Moonchild Productions subfolder in Roaming...

Unread post by Fedor2 » 2018-06-14, 17:47

Indeed palemoon portable create empty folder there, did not remark that until now. So it is code editing must be involved, and i consider do it, because i do not like appdata idea at all, on my pc i do it readonly sometimes.

Fedor2

Re: Moonchild Productions subfolder in Roaming...

Unread post by Fedor2 » 2018-07-30, 14:16

I have found what to edit in the code:

1. toolkit\profile\nsToolkitProfileService.cpp

Code: Select all

nsresult
nsToolkitProfileService::Init(int portable)
{
    //MYPAL CODE
    if(portable>0) return NS_OK;

    NS_ASSERTION(gDirServiceProvider, "No dirserviceprovider!");
    nsresult rv;
2. dom\system\OSFileConstants.cpp
Make the check above or skip

Code: Select all

  GetPathToSpecialDir(NS_OS_HOME_DIR, paths->homeDir);
  GetPathToSpecialDir(NS_OS_DESKTOP_DIR, paths->desktopDir);
  GetPathToSpecialDir(XRE_USER_APP_DATA_DIR, paths->userApplicationDataDir);

#if defined(XP_WIN)
  GetPathToSpecialDir(NS_WIN_APPDATA_DIR, paths->winAppDataDir);
  GetPathToSpecialDir(NS_WIN_PROGRAMS_DIR, paths->winStartMenuProgsDir);
#endif // defined(XP_WIN)

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