Portable Software vs fully installed

Hi perhaps a strange question. I hear many wilders are using portable software
as a means to keep more private and anonymous in general, even keeping the portable Tor, Virtualbox, firefox etc in an encrypted container.

I like this idea, but was thinking if there was a negative trade off doing so?

I mean as in if I want to use Firefox would I loose stability, performance or addon compatibility etc, or programs like ccleaner or privazer would not be able to see newly installed programs or it would be looking in the wrong place to clean files etc....

Am a preaching or paranoia to far in my way of thinking ?

 

Portable Firefox shouldn't have any major issues in those areas. I believe you can configure CCleaner and Privazer with custom rules.

 

Don't portable apps usually install or run from, at least partially, in the user's %appdata% directories? If this is the case and you are using anti-executable enforcement on these directories then you'd have to create rules for them. This is the only caveat of portable apps I can think of.

 

And even if you did so, malware could write to those same executables that you created rules for.

 

Normally, portable apps using the .paf platform only use the folder where the app is installed and do not write to the %appdata% directories. VLC Player, I recall, is a rare exception. Zipped portable apps, however (such as PaleMoon zip build), do usually write to %appdata% so are not truly "portable."

I use portable apps mostly for ease of installing and removing the app, especially for software I'm just testing. The only disadvantage to portable apps is that they are generally packed for small size rather than fast starting, so they take a bit longer than installed apps to open the first time after the computer is booted.

 

Its these custom rules and custom set ups aspect which is why I do not use portable apps much.

If I installed a portable app I may forget to tell ccleaner to delete files in this folder etc

Guess it would take some doing to make sure everything is 100% set up and working, course if I moved the portable folder

I think for some portable apps it makes sense like virtual box or tc etc otherwise think ill stick to the normal installation set ups.