So after noticing a lot of people asking the same thing I’ve been wanting to know.
“How do you install Brave to a different location”
And basically getting told you can’t.
I decided to launch the brave installer in a sandbox environment and capture everything that happens.
So now I’ve got the complete brave directory path locations and all of the files 877 MB total that also includes all the files used in the installation process a few seem like they could be the actual program installer. And I can go through the logs and see exactly what order the installation process was executed in. and some bonus knowledge I wasn’t expecting, I also got all Braves registry key locations. so I’m going to analyze all the logs and files I’ve gathered and see if I can’t figure anything out. I’ll post on this again if I find something cool.
So something very interesting did happen but definitely not what I expected.
When I went to the directory within the folder where the main Brave launcher was located and click on it…
The browser actually LAUNCHED. But the browser is NOT currently installed on my computer I even checked the program file directories just to be sure.
My guess is because this folder contains every single file in the exact Running order all the files would have been installed plus it’s registry entries contained an actual registry Hive files.
It’s now acting almost like a portable program build, it’s just not all crammed into single executable file. But I can move this folder anywhere on any Drive and it launch without fail every time. This definitely could be an alternative method to putting Brave anywhere you want.
But Im still digging through the data to try and figure out how to actually install it to a user specified directory. Creating a portable version was just an accident.
I’m not sure how the moderators that run this site would feel about dropping software names of other companies so I’m not comfortable giving the name of the sandbox software I used but it is the most widely used.
I only use the sandbox for the install part I wanted to catch every file all at once not have to go looking and I wanted a log of what it was doing during the installation and I didn’t want it deleting any installation files after it finished. But I think this experiment turned out okay and I wound up with the browser all in the little self-contained environment and is even random exe files for what looks like manual updating tools. it is weird that I only ran the data installer but the folder contained not only the beta version but the main release build as well. but my initial goal was to just get it off of my main drive and it turned out better now the browsers appdata files are not even on the main drive. So even though it was pure dumb luck I still counted as a win.