Audion Browsers Portable - user guide

Contents

• How the window works
• First run
• Which browsers are here, and why only these
• What is inside a build
• Updating
• The certificates
• Build settings
• Worth knowing

This program makes portable browsers: ones that live in a folder, start from anywhere, and are never installed into Windows. Bookmarks, passwords and tabs stay inside that folder, so it travels on a flash drive or goes to someone else as it is.

How the window works

Four tabs across the top: INSTALL, UPDATE, CERTIFICATE, SERVICE. That is the whole menu: press a tab and its commands, with their settings, are right underneath — there is nowhere to descend into. Above the tabs sits a service strip with the folder cleanups, which belong to the program as a whole rather than to any one tab.

Every choice is made with buttons. The chosen one is washed with blue, the rest stay outlined. Browsers are outlined each in its own colour, so the row is read by name rather than by position.

Captions are short. The explanation — what will happen, what a wrong answer costs — appears in the tooltip when the pointer rests on the control.

First run

1. Tab SERVICE → 7-ZIP. Nothing can be unpacked without it.
2. Tab INSTALL → pick the browsers with the buttons and press BUILD.

Each browser is 120–240 MB of download and about half a gigabyte on disk. The builds appear in the Target folder (output\Portable); start one with <Browser> Portable.cmd in its root.

If one browser fails, the others are still built — the failures are listed at the end.

Which browsers are here, and why only these

Those without a self-updating portable build of their own:

• Google Chrome — no portable version exists;
• Yandex Browser — no portable version, and the Russian CA certificates are

already built into it;

• Brave — the portable builds are third-party and do not update;
• Chromium-Gost — speaks the GOST encryption that government portals need;
• Ungoogled Chromium — Chromium without Google's services.

Not here and not planned: Vivaldi, Cent Browser and Opera — each has its own portable install that updates itself, so this program adds nothing. Thorium was tried and removed: 32-bit builds only, and store extensions do not install in it.

What is inside a build

Folder or file	What it is
App	The browser itself. Replaced wholesale on update.
Data	Your profile: bookmarks, passwords, tabs, extensions.
Cache	Cache. Safe to delete.
Certificates	The certificates and two files — install and remove.
<Browser> Portable.cmd	Starts the browser.
Portable-Build.json	Which versions are inside.

Updating

The UPDATE tab.

CHECK shows what has been published next to the version of your build. Nothing is downloaded.

UPDATE replaces only the browser inside the build and leaves Data and Cache alone, so the profile stays. A build whose browser and wrapper are both current is skipped without downloading.

The update happens where the build lies. Point Source at its folder — a flash drive, a network share, wherever it lives — and it is updated in place. Nothing has to be copied, and the Target folder is not used here: that one is for new builds.

With no build in Source, the program looks in output\Portable — at what it made itself.

The certificates

Russian state sites are signed by an authority Windows does not trust out of the box, so such a site opens with a security warning. The steps are separate so that nothing happens by itself.

While building — the checkbox State site certificates. It puts the files and two shortcuts, install and revoke, into the build. It installs nothing.

Tab CERTIFICATE → INSTALL — adds them to your own Windows account's store, which every Chromium browser reads. No administrator rights; other users of the machine see no change.

REVOKE — removes exactly those two certificates by fingerprint; anything else stays.

CHECK shows whether they are installed and changes nothing.

Yandex Browser needs none of this: the certificates are already in it.

Build settings

Portability. What keeps the profile inside the build folder. CHROME++ is the wrapper this program started with: its version.dll goes next to the browser. PROXY LIBRARY is another wrapper of the same kind, by neyrostalker: it does the same job, additionally blocks writes to the registry, and Microsoft's antivirus does not treat it as a threat. The differences and the check results are in docs/CHROME_PLUS_AND_DEFENDER.md.

Wrapper architecture. Leave it at AUTO. The program reads whether the browser is 32- or 64-bit and uses the matching Chrome++ wrapper. This is not a formality: a 32-bit browser with a 64-bit wrapper starts as if nothing were wrong, but its profile goes to the system and the build stops being portable.

Leave no traces in Windows. Off by default. With it on, the browser wipes its own registry branch when it exits. That branch is shared with an installed copy of the same browser, so turn it on only where that browser is not installed.

Pack into an archive. Turn it on when the builds are to be handed over: one file instead of a folder. The format sits next to it — ZIP opens anywhere, 7Z is smaller but needs 7-Zip on the other side.

Keep working files (under Advanced). Downloads and unpacked installers stay in workspace — useful when a build failed and the reason has to be found.

Worth knowing

The first start of any build takes longer — the browser is laying out its profile.

A portable build and an installed browser of the same name run side by side without disturbing each other.