Thorium

[66cats]

43 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

BTW, did I mention that I have over 38 years of DOS

 

navy seal copypasta 
And yet, it magically reappears. Not sure why facts and reality misalign with your 38 years of DOS registry experience. And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

Where is the nearest brick wall?

I'd like to argue with the brick wall instead.

[UCyborg]

[AstroSkipper]

8 hours ago, 66cats said:

Well. I just don't understand it.

Ok. Then I'll be a little clearer. When I write something technical or computer-related here, it's certainly not to tell any anecdotes or to troll. I'm happy to leave that to our specialists.  Here is a little food for thought. If an application writes values to the registry, it is certainly not doing so to make itself important or to fool the user. Thorium is not a purely portable application. It does what other Chrome browsers do. And recently I had to unfortunately realise that these registry entries play a role. And BTW, they are not stored in the main folder as this version of Thorium has not been made portable. Just that simple. 

PS: Further information what a portable application is or not can be found in @VistaLover's post here: https://msfn.org/board/topic/186133-thorium/?do=findComment&comment=1267361

 

Edited June 7, 2024 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[UCyborg]

This PreferenceMACs key is the strange one, extensions' data it holds are all binary, but it's always brought up when profile migrations are brought up.

I don't know about registry in general either, I prefer a static set of programs for main Windows install so things don't get deleted constantly from registry. It would be interesting to have some reproducible way to "gunk it up" to make computer slow.

There's a lot of snake oil out there for registry, "leaving it alone" works for me, I only mess with it if I know about some user program's setting I want to change or if I want to alter Windows behavior in some specific way. I definitely never went out of the way to block programs from writing their stuff there if that's how they were programmed.

I ran NTRegOpt every once in a blue moon, but the impression I got was that in my case fragmentation was always low and not worth the bother. Windows itself (re)writes stuff there all the time, can't say if it really makes things slower with time.

[Dixel]

12 hours ago, 66cats said:

 

And yet, it magically reappears. Not sure why facts and reality misalign with your 38 years of DOS registry experience. And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.

We have no way of telling/knowing what portable loaders you used to achieve that, and we have no way of proving/disproving it works or doesn't work in your case, 

I run this browser with my personally written starter App on Vista, so I don't care about that entries. @AstroSkipper doesn't run fully portable version, there's no reason to accuse a higly respected member of MSFN, and simply a good man, of trolling!

Edited June 7, 2024 by Dixel
and simply a good man

[Dixel]

3 hours ago, UCyborg said:

There's a lot of snake oil out there for registry,

Registry is there for a couple of main purposes. It includes tracking, logging for devs, surveying the legitimacy of software (trial timers, etc), simplifying police/forensic investigators.

[AstroSkipper]

Many issues in Windows are caused by corrupted or missing registry entries. From the very first in the 1990s, I learnt to correct such things. Especially, the installer and uninstaller of that time were often badly programmed and caused problems on a regular base regarding the registry. My Windows XP partition was created from scratch in 2004. It has existed since then without reinstallation only because of my maintenance and corrections. And the registry is particularly affected by this. For 100% portable use of Thorium, I have also backed up its registry entries and would create them if Thorium were to be run on another Windows XP computer. 

[NotHereToPlayGames]

My dad would buy a brand new computer every two years!

Complained it was "slow" so he would just go out and buy new!

It took YEARS to finally convince him that "electrons don't slow down with AGE, your computer is slow because the REGISTRY is not being MAINTAINED".

Of course, I could never "train an old dog" on how to MAINTAIN the registy.

But I could teach him to REINSTALL WINDOWS every two years and be back to BRAND-NEW FAST without spending money on a new computer.

Edited June 7, 2024 by NotHereToPlayGames

[AstroSkipper]

Due to the regular maintainence of my Windows XP, there is no need to reinstall the OS.  It is even faster than in its early days. I did so much to it that even Thorium runs well under Windows XP. I also have a well thought-out image system and can return to a previous state at any time.  Even to the very first one. 

[66cats]

3 hours ago, Dixel said:

We have no way of telling/knowing what portable loaders you used to achieve that

Unless you're suggesting that all this is an elaborate ruse, all you need do is watch the vid or ask me. The only loader i'm using is the batch file included with Thorium, the one I'm clicking in the screencap (THORIUM_PORTABLE.bat). It simply starts Thorium with the following flags, thusly: START "" "thorium.exe" --user-data-dir="%~dp0%\USER_DATA" --allow-outdated-plugins --disable-breakpad --disable-encryption --disable-machine-id.

3 hours ago, Dixel said:

we have no way of proving/disproving it works or doesn't work in your case, 

As suggested in my previous posts, you have a trivially simple way to verify it works in *your* case:

1. Run THORIUM_PORTABLE.bat & close Thorium, taking note of installed extensions, configuration, and open tabs

2. Delete the Thorium key i delete in the screencap vid

3. Run THORIUM_PORTABLE.bat 

4. Observe the key mysteriously restored to the registry & thorium open to its last state.

 

 

[AstroSkipper]

11 minutes ago, 66cats said:

3 hours ago, Dixel said:

We have no way of telling/knowing what portable loaders you used to achieve that

Unless you're suggesting that all this is an elaborate ruse, all you need do is watch the vid or ask me. The only loader i'm using is the batch file included with Thorium, the one I'm clicking in the screencap (THORIUM_PORTABLE.bat). It simply starts Thorium with the following flags, thusly: START "" "thorium.exe" --user-data-dir="%~dp0%\USER_DATA" --allow-outdated-plugins --disable-breakpad --disable-encryption --disable-machine-id.

Now, I know what you did. You are using the flag --disable-encryption which is unsecure and not recommended. This is a flag which makes Thorium more portable, though. I do not use it. 

[66cats]

6 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

unsecure and not recommended.

XP is insecure and not recommended. If not this batch file (Thorium portable), what where you talking about? 

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, 66cats said:

XP is insecure and not recommended. 

Ethics on this forum doesn't allow to use such references in regards of old OS, MSFN is a home for old OS fans. Probably, you still don't know that?

For example DAVE, our respected moderator, uses XP on his daily basis, I use Vista.

[UCyborg]

Isn't this encryption thing Windows only? I'm almost sure you can move Chromium based browser profiles around on Linux by default. Almost because last time I tried it was with Edge around version 94 era and I just replaced the distro (Arch-based -> Debian-based) on the same machine and kept Edge's profile folder from somewhere under .config folder.

Likewise, there's no registry on Linux, so how do extensions' settings survive there? No Thorium at hand at the moment, but I tried getting rid of Supermium's registry key, launched the browser, extensions and their settings survived.

Just the picture showing the extensions so I don't have to write them down.

Another slightly off-topic remark about registry, work laptop has had Win10 1809 since new. No registry maintenance, cleaners, nothing, just works. Software that is used regularly is also regularly updated. But it does seem like I've heard more often about OS reinstalls in XP era than in 10 era or 7+ era in general. I'm the only one in the family that was ever into computers, but I don't have much work with family's computers either beyond initial setup, despite them not being very computer savy.

Yeah, did a lot of XP reinstalls back then, though that computer was shared. I suspect we got smarter over time and Windows became a bit more robust in general.