scalar email

Why Aren’t All Applications Portable?

It’s a question that nags at any person that has loved portable applications: why aren’t all applications mobile?

Today’s Question & Answer session involves us courtesy of SuperUser– a community of Stack Exchange, a community-drive group of Q&A web sites.

The Question

SuperUser visitor Tom loves the clean company mobile applications offer and wishes to know why whatever isn’t mobile:

I’ve lately been trying to ‘set up’ things a great deal much less on my Windows maker (I dislike installers– I require to know where programs put things …), selecting to use mobile or standalone variations of applications rather.

I put them done in a ‘Programs’ dir on a drive different from my Windows dividers, so whenever I reinstall, I have all my applications offered with minimal initiative and on the bonus side, I obtain a good tidy configuration.

Applications like Office and Creative Suite still require me to experience a badly lengthy installation process where a thousand random collections and devices are thrown across my system.

Why do Windows apps still need installing? Why can not we just drag Photoshop to a folder à la OSX and simply have it function? Does any person else focus on mobile apps, or am I simply being OCD regarding the whole thing?

We’re certainly fans of portable apps as well as would certainly additionally like to get to the bottom of points.

The Answer

SuperUser contributor David Whitney offers some understanding right into why numerous apps aren’t portable as well as exactly how Windows imposes a sort of anti-portability arrangement:

Installers are a result of years of development and a little of (streamlined) background helps understand why they do what they do.

The Windows 3.1 design suggested config.ini style arrangement data per application with sustaining shared libaries going into system folders to stop replication and squandered disk space.

Windows 95 introduced the windows registry enabling a central store for application arrangement changing numerous arrangement documents. A lot more notably, windows setup was saved in the same place.

The computer system registry ended up being bloated because of applications not cleaning up after themselves. DLL heck happened as an outcome of numerous versions of the same shared collections overwriting each other.

. Web presented the principle of app.config (almost ini files mark 2, this time around with a bit more structure conserving designers wasting time creating manual parsers). The GAC was presented to version shared assemblies in an attempt to avoid DLL Hell.

In Windows XP and moreso in Vista, Microsoft attempted to specify the userspace as a place to store individual information as well as arrangement data in a solitary standard place to permit roamning profiles and also easy migration (just copy your profile) with the applications mounted in Program Files.

So I guess, the factor is that “applications in Windows are designed to stay in one place, their shared dependencies in an additional, and also the customer particular information in another”, which practically antagonizes the concept of xcopying a solitary area.

. and that’s before you need to configure individual accounts, as well as configuration as well as guarantee safety consents, and download updates, and mount home windows services …

xcopy is the “easy case” and also certainly isn’t a finest fit for whatever.

Regrettably for fans of all points portable, numerous apps– particularly large applications like Office– will certainly continue to be securely taken care of to and dispersed across the os.

Have something to contribute to the explanation? Speak up in the comments. Intend to learn more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange customers? Take a look at the full conversation thread below.

Leave a Reply