Audion Yandex Portable - user guide
Audion Yandex Portable - user guide
Contents
This program makes a portable Yandex Browser: one that lives in a folder, starts from anywhere, and is never installed into Windows. Everything the browser remembers about you — bookmarks, tabs, passwords — stays inside that same folder.
How the window works
Three tabs across the top: INSTALL, UPDATE, SERVICE. That is the whole menu: press a tab and its commands, with their settings, are right underneath. Above the tabs sits a service strip with the folder cleanups, which belong to the program as a whole.
Choices are made with buttons — the chosen one washed with blue, the rest outlined. Captions are short; the explanation appears in the tooltip when the pointer rests on a button or a checkbox.
First run
- Tab
SERVICE→7-ZIP. Without it the installer cannot be unpacked. - Tab
INSTALL→BUILD.
About 200 MB is downloaded and roughly 500 MB unpacked. The finished build appears in the Target folder (output\Portable\Yandex Browser Portable). Start it with Yandex Browser Portable.cmd in its root.
The folder can go anywhere: another drive, a flash drive, a colleague. The profile travels with it.
What is inside the 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, nothing is lost. |
Yandex Browser Portable.cmd | Starts the browser. |
Portable-Build.json | Which versions are inside — browser and Chrome++. |
Updating
The UPDATE tab.
CHECK shows what is published next to the version of your build. Nothing is downloaded: the version is read out of the download link. Worth running first — the installer itself is 200 MB.
UPDATE replaces only the browser inside the build: Data and Cache are left alone, so the profile stays. If the browser is already current, nothing is downloaded at all.
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 nothing in Source, the program looks in output\Portable.
CHROME++ is for when the browser should not be touched: version.dll and chrome++.ini are replaced directly in the build — 180 KB. The wrapper is released more often than the browser.
Build settings
Leave no traces in Windows. The browser keeps service counters in the Windows registry rather than in the profile. This tells the build to erase that branch when the browser closes, so nothing of it is left behind.
Clear it when a normally installed Yandex Browser is present on the machine: the branch is shared, and the portable build would erase the installed one's counters.
Remove the built-in updater. Leave it on. Otherwise Yandex's own updater will one day install the browser into the system past the portable folder, and the point of the build is gone. Updating the build is this program's job.
Pack into an archive. Turn it on when the build is 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. For your own use a folder is handier — it runs straight away.
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 X64. That is what Yandex ships for Windows, and the architecture has to match.
Keep working files (under Advanced). The download and the unpacked installer stay in workspace — useful when a build failed and the reason has to be found.
Worth knowing
Yandex Browser already trusts the Russian Ministry of Digital Development certificates, so there is nothing to install for them, and the browser does not change the system store. That is usually the point of a portable build: sites issued against those certificates open, and the system stays clean.
The first start takes longer than usual — the browser is laying out the profile. After that it starts as always.