Can I run Chromium without installing it?

Yes. Most maintainers publish a portable archive alongside the installer. Extract it and run the executable directly, with no administrator rights and no registry changes.

How do I keep a portable Chromium's profile in its own folder?

Launch it with the --user-data-dir flag pointing at a folder inside the portable directory. Without that flag, Chromium writes its profile to the normal system location instead.

Can I run two versions of Chromium at the same time?

Yes, as long as each one is launched with a different --user-data-dir. Two builds sharing one profile directory will conflict.

Portable Chromium

A portable build runs from any folder. It writes no registry keys, needs no administrator rights, and can live on a USB stick. Most Chromium maintainers publish one alongside the installer, usually as a .7z or .zip.

Useful when you do not have administrator rights, when you want several Chromium versions side by side, or when you want the browser to leave no trace on the machine.

Running one

Extract the archive and run chrome.exe from inside it. That is the whole process on Windows.

By default Chromium still writes its profile to the system user data directory, which defeats the point. To keep everything together, launch it with an explicit profile path:

chrome.exe --user-data-dir=".\User Data"

Make a shortcut with that argument, or a one-line batch file next to the executable:

@echo off
start "" "%~dp0chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="%~dp0User Data"

Now bookmarks, extensions, history and passwords all live inside the folder, and moving the folder moves the browser complete with its state.

On macOS and Linux the same flag applies:

./chrome --user-data-dir="$(dirname "$0")/User Data"

Running two versions side by side

Give each one its own --user-data-dir. Chromium keys almost all per-installation state on that directory, so two builds with two profile paths will not interfere with each other and can run simultaneously.

This is the standard way to test whether a bug exists in a newer build without disturbing your working setup.

AppImage on Linux

Linux portable builds are often AppImages, a single executable file. Mark it executable, then run it:

chmod +x ungoogled-chromium-*.AppImage
./ungoogled-chromium-*.AppImage

If it fails on a newer distribution with an error about FUSE, either install libfuse2 or extract and run it directly:

./ungoogled-chromium-*.AppImage --appimage-extract
./squashfs-root/AppRun

What portable builds cannot do

They cannot update themselves, and neither can installed ones, but portable builds are worse in practice because no package manager can help. Updating means extracting the new archive over the old folder. Back up your User Data directory first.

They cannot be your default browser in the normal way, because that registration is exactly the kind of system change portable software avoids.

They are not sandboxed away from your files. Portable means it does not install, not that it is isolated. The browser has the same access to your documents as any program you run.

Widevine may not work. DRM sometimes depends on components resolved at install time. If paid streaming matters to you, test it before committing to a portable setup. See Widevine and DRM.

On a USB stick

It works, with two caveats. USB flash storage is slow, and a browser profile is a busy little database, so expect it to feel sluggish. And profiles do a lot of small writes, which wears cheap flash out faster than you might expect. Fine for occasional use, poor as a daily driver.