Palemoon Portable NOT portable

[infti]

I have a copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 on an external drive with a session different from what is on my main copy.

I decided to try Palemoon Portable 28.1 It comes as an installer package (WHY?)

I installed the program and opened it. It opened the session described in the first sentence above, from Palemoon Portable 27.9.2, which at the time was not even on the computer I was using (the external drive was not connected).

This shows that neither the copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 on the external drive nor the newly downloaded and installed copy of Palemoon Portable 28.1 is actually portable. Can somebody on this forum respond?

I suspect that this situation is somehow related to the inability of Palemoon to handle sessions, but I honestly do not understand what is going on with this situation.

Thanks!

[Moonchild]

I suspect that this situation is related to the inability of the user to launch the correct executable when instructed to do so.
If you launch palemoon.exe and not palemoon-portable.exe, it will use the normal profile location in %appdata%

[infti]

Thanks for your quick response.

Palemoon Portable 28.1 was installed to the directory J:\Portable Applications\Palemoon Portable 28.1

There is no file with the filename "palemoon-portable.exe" in that directory or any of its subdirectories.

Additionally, if Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 is really portable, why is its session in "the normal profile location in %appdata%" or indeed anywhere but in some directory under its installation in the external drive? Furthermore, what about the session from the copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 which is on my internal drive and is the one I normally use? Is that also in "the normal profile location in %appdata%"? If so, how can I locate it and how can I distinguish it from the session from the copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 on the external drive?

Thanks again!

[gepus]

Palemoon Portable 28.1 was installed to the directory J:\Portable Applications\Palemoon Portable 28.1

Pale Moon Portable will be installed (extracted) to the location chosen by the user.

There is no file with the filename "palemoon-portable.exe" in that directory or any of its subdirectories.

If there is no "Palemoon-Portable.exe" as you have been told already, then you didn't download the official package.
The official package must contain that file and only by starting the browser always from that file will make the browser run as portable.
Where did you download the package (7z) from?

[coffeebreak]

There is no file with the filename "palemoon-portable.exe" in that directory or any of its subdirectories.

It belongs in the top level/root directory, that's where mine is.

This is a screenshot of the root directory of a freshly extracted copy of portable PM 28.1:

why is its session in "the normal profile location in %appdata%"

It won't be, If the portable version is started via the portable shell with palemoon-portable.exe.

Then all files related to sessions will be in the portable version's self-contained profile, at: \User\Palemoon\Profiles\Default

[infti]

The url for the download is

http://rm-us.palemoon.org/release/palem ... taller.exe

I did notice that the word "portable" does not occur in this url. I will therefore try to retrace my steps in getting to that url. That may take a while because I do not see the previous pages in the history. What I do know is that I went to Palemoon Portable x 32 section of Palemoon.org.

By retracing my steps, I hope to find out whether I somehow went astray from there.

What I also observed is that, in the copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 on the external drive which I mentioned, the file Palemoon-Portable.exe is in the bin directory. In the 28.1 package I downloaded, there is no bin directory.

The question also still remains: How did the session from the copy of Palemoon Portable 27.9.2 on the external drive get onto my C:\ drive?

[infti]

I have retraced the steps I went through to download the package. I did this by doing it again because I could not find the steps in the History.

I went to http://www.palemoon.org/

The steps from there are:

Hover over Download tab, then hover over Palemoon tab, then click on Palemoon Portable.

I then clicked on the Direct Download Installer in the 32 bit column and the "Pale Moon Americas" row.

Retracing these steps clarifies why they are not shown in the "History".

I just downloaded the file again. It has the same filename as before

palemoon-28.1.0.win32.installer.exe

and it is the same size: 33,887,481 bytes.

[LimboSlam]

I see the confusion..

Here is the correct url: https://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml, which you were really close, but you didn't scroll far enough. Please scroll down till you find the portable version (It'll say "Portable versions") of Pale Moon on that page, and then pick the respective mirror. See below:

[infti]

Thanks a lot for this.

It explains everything I was asking about.

The situation is both worse and better than I have thought:

Worse: Not only is "Palemoon Portable" not portable: It is not even "Palemoon Portable".

Better: I should be able to fix the problem by uninstalling what I have and installing the real portable version.

Question: Where is the session for the non-portable Palemoon I mistakenly installed? I want to find it and copy it into the portable installation.

Another question: Is Palemoon 28.1 similar to recent versions of Firefox?

I need to know this, because Firefox crashes my system. Last time this happened, I caught it jut before the actual crash. The C:\ drive was spooling and Firefox was taking up 12 gb of memory. Yes, 12 GB ---- can you believe it? How can they even think about putting out something like this?

[Isengrim]

Better: I should be able to fix the problem by uninstalling what I have and installing the real portable version.

Technically you don't install the portable version, just extract and run. Regardless, you can have a portable version living on your system alongside the installed version without problems.

Question: Where is the session for the non-portable Palemoon I mistakenly installed? I want to find it and copy it into the portable installation.

If you mean profile, it should be located in your profile directory, which is probably "C:\Users\<Username>\Application Data\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon\Profiles". You can also find it by navigating to "about:profiles" from the browser.

Another question: Is Palemoon 28.1 similar to recent versions of Firefox?

No. But as always, when it comes to performance, it varies widely based on what hardware and configuration is present on your machine. In short, Your Mileage May Vary.

[infti]

Thanks.

I know how portable applications work --- "install" was colloquial abuse of language.

"navigating to "about:profiles" from the browser" --- I don't know what this means. Can you explain?

Regarding performance --- my system is a Dell Latitude 6230 laptop with I5, Windows 7x64 Pro, a 500 gb SSD and 16 GB RAM. So --- NO EXCUSE for Firefox to do what it does to my system. If Palemoon 28.1 is not constructed the same way, there should be no problem.

Plus, with the REAL portable version, it should be easy to check.

[back2themoon]

What you are describing for Firefox, is not standard/default behaviour (not even for Firefox..) and shouldn't be happening. Perhaps other factors are at play (security software, browser extensions, other software etc.) and if the same combination of factors is also applied to Pale Moon, you just might end up having the same problem.

[somdcomputerguy]

"navigating to "about:profiles" from the browser" --- I don't know what this means. Can you explain?

Type about:profiles in the address bar.

[infti]

The following is the page that results:


The address isn't valid

The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded.

Web addresses are usually written like http://www.example.com/
Make sure that you're using forward slashes (i.e. /).

[ron_1]

Must have mistyped it. Try copy-and-paste.

about:profiles

[infti]

Did, and did it again from this last entry. Same result.

[Moonchild]

FTR: the website has also been updated to jump directly to the portable heading from the menu now, to prevent confusion.

[infti]

I have now downloaded and unpacked Palemoon Portable 28.1. What I found is that, in addition to Palemoon-Portable.exe in the root directory (Palemoon Portable 28.1), there is the following:

Palemoon Portable 28.1\bin\Palemoon\Palemoon. exe

What is this file?

Thanks.

[therube]

Palemoon.exe is the Pale Moon program executable.

Palemoon-Portable.exe is a "stub" executable that launches Palemoon.exe.

In order to be running "portable", you must run Palemoon-Portable.exe, not Palemoon.exe.

If you do run Palemoon.exe, directly, then at that point anything "portable", is not, & Palemoon.exe will use any defaulted "system" Profile that it find (or create one, if need be).

[infti]

So it appears that Palemoon-Portable.exe invokes Palemoon.exe within the portable environment. Is that correct? If so, that appears to be the root of the problem I have been experiencing.