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I'm looking for a portable version of Chrome (not Chromium) that I can work with on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I can only find Chromium or really outdated versions. Due to limitation on the machine I'm using, I cannot install Wine or utilize any admin features as I am on a standard account. Ideally, I would rather have an official version or at least one that exists in a repository that I can apt-get from.

(I understand that apt-get requires sudo, I can use it for the initial vagrant setup, but that's all. Hence why I would need non-admin methods)

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Well, "portable" means almost nothing in the Linux world.
You can install any application anywhere on a system. If you do it carefully, in principle you can install any application and its dependencies on a USB stick with a ext partitioning and launch it on any Linux computer with the same architecture.

In particular, Chrome is already "more" portable, since it is entirely self-contained in /opt/google/chrome/.

Just copy that directory somewhere else and you can launch it from anywhere.

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    It will still put its data in the home directory wherever you install it. The idea of a portable app means it keeps all the data in a subdirectory of where it is installed. I actually want a portable Chrome instance for occasional use of an extension I don't trust and need rarely.
    – Ivan
    Apr 7, 2019 at 16:15
  • If it's for using an extension that you do not trust, you should consider a virtual machine.
    – dadexix86
    Apr 7, 2019 at 19:05
  • Fyi, symlinking the dir above back to /opt doesnt work "Too many levels of symbolic links". However running the google-chrome file in there does. You can also symlink the ~.config/google-chrome data dir to another place. There is an appimage available, but it is by a private party and not up to date, and so a bit sus. Maybe there is a way to run a hash check on it against the original, as you can unpack the appimages.
    – alchemy
    Mar 29, 2022 at 3:54
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I made a bash script to make Google Chrome portable in Ubuntu, Debian , Linux Mint or any linux supporting *.deb files. You can also run as many instances of Chrome as you wish.

Here is the link and steps. It's easy.

https://github.com/shivamgoyal15/Google-Chrome-Portable-maker-for-linux

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  • This should be the answer. It works. Not sure how much it changes the chrome-sandbox (it changes ownership to root and chmod 4755). This file seems to be the main problem with Portablizing Chrome because of symlinks to root file system. Read this link about how it protects users: computer.howstuffworks.com/google-chrome-browser7.htm. However, I like keeping my browser in a Veracrypt volume, so if the usb connection to that thumb drive is pulled or power lost, it automatically shuts the volume (maybe only one rare time of data loss). Very good security, but may lose this sandbox featur
    – alchemy
    Mar 30, 2020 at 21:43
  • btw, thank you so much!! I've been trying to do this ever since switching to Ubuntu several years ago. On Windows it was trivial. Be careful if you try using an exFAT format for the Veracrypt, I spent hours trying to fix a permissions error from tar (FAT has no permissions). EXT4 with Use on on Linux worked.
    – alchemy
    Mar 30, 2020 at 21:46

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