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Price of Portability

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edbro:
I use quite a few apps that come in regular or portable versions. Without regards to speed, I would think that a portable installation would always be preferable. So, should I assume that using the registry is faster than a portable config file? Why offer two versions of the same software if a portable install would do the trick?

Yes, I know that Firefox portable is designed to not use a cache. So, there is an example of an app that is better with a normal install. Any others?

f0dder:
The registry is safer than most standalone config systems, since writes are journalled. It's also faster, but that probably hasn't been relevant since the 80286 days (still gives a fuzzy feeling, though). It's not really hard supporting both registry and config-file support though, if you design your code properly and use a hierarchical/tree-structure configfile format like XML.

Offering two different versions shouldn't be necessary for most software, install-time (or even post-install) switching between regular and portable shouldn't be that difficult for a lot of stuff. Lots of application developers are either lazy or don't give much thought to this, though.

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