Best Free Portable Applications | Gizmo's Freeware. Portable Apps Index. Select a Category: About. This list provides a collection of portable apps from across Gizmo's Freeware and other sites. Portable freeware is an amazing development and is forcing software vendors to adjust their wasteful ways. They reduce problems with uninstalling software (you just delete them and don't have to worry about failed installs or incomplete uninstalls), they allow for extra flexibility in copying or moving software to different locations on a portable device or on a PC, and they help improve your privacy and security by running from portable devices like flash drives. Take your "computer setup" with you, keep every piece of free software that impresses you or run them, say, at a library. I suggest starting a collection, or an army actually, of your favorite portable apps instead of trying to minimize the number of programs you install. For an introduction to portable software, read the Guide to Portable Applications. Installation Tips. [Firefox Tips] Disable Add-on Signature Check, Suggested Sites on New Tab Page and Website Blocking Feature - Recently Mozilla released a new version of Firefox web. A library of over 1,000,000 free and free-to-try software applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobile as well as Windows device drivers, games and gaming tools. Firefox. Update Firefox: > Help > Check for Updates Download and install browser updates if necessary.If your problem persists, check extensions and themes. Quickbooks Pro Validation Code Keygen Free . Step 1: At each download site make sure to get the "portable" or "standalone" version. Most sites clearly label it as such. Usually it's a regular file name ending with EXE, ZIP, or PAF. EXE (usually, but not always, without words like "setup" in the download file name). EXE files run "as is", or they self- extract after you double- click them. ZIP files must be extracted first. Right- click the ZIP folder > "Extract All..", or double click on it if you associate archive files with something like 7- Zip. If the downloaded file ends with PAF. EXE, just double- click it and install it to a folder of your choice (and if you copy over the previous version of a program it even deletes the older version first). Other download formats usually have a special launcher (such as the downloads for Liber. Key). But sometimes you choose portable as an option during installation (Foobar music player comes to mind). Step 2: It's a good idea to create a folder for your portable apps, if you haven't already. I suggest creating a sub folder for each program within your portable folder or moving its existing folder to your portable folder (as long as they allow for relative paths; a few don't and would quit working if you move them around freely). In any case, after you get the portable app functional, you must make a shortcut to it. The easiest way is to create a shortcut in a portable launcher (or the portable launcher that comes with a suite of portable programs). PStart, for example, allows you to drag and drop EXE files and automatically create a shortcut in its launcher. Whereas, Portable. Apps Suite type launchers automatically search its Portable. Apps folder and add shortcuts for you after you refresh or restart the launcher (just as long as you create individual folders for all your portable apps). Or go to your portable apps folder, right- click on the main application for the portable app (usually it's the one with a recognizable icon and a large file size), and select "Create Shortcut" or "Send to > Desktop". Then simply right- click the shortcut and select "pin to start menu" (Vista), or drag the shortcut to the start menu. ![]() Read How to Manually Create a Program Launcher for an interesting approach (the approach I'm using). Or upload your portable apps to an online backup site, such as Windows Live Skydrive, if you intend on using them on various computers. Tru. Portable: Portability + Stealth. We will start marking applications as "Tru. Portable" if they work as standalone apps and run without waste (few significant registry entries, few auto installation features, little need for user tweaking, etc.). This excludes registry entries automatically created by windows. An application must work from a flash drive and run without problems on most computers. We also require no user involvement (to make an app portable). For this designation, we want apps to do their job and leave the rest of the computer alone! Best Free Portable Apps for Audio & Video. Best Free Portable CD / DVD Burner: Infra. Recorder - - Home | Download | Support | Editor Review. Description: Infra. Recorder is a common choice for a simple burner (its the top pick at Portable. Apps. com & Lupo Pen. Suite for example), but Img. Burn is our "Top Pick" and can be made portable (see alternate products). Infra. Recorder is portable out- of- box and therefore excellent for average users. It can create data discs, audio & video discs, write images for bootable discs, copy discs, read discs, and erase/format discs. The welcome screen is optional, but its built- in help didn't work for me."It works with all types of CDs and DVDs including dual layer discs. It even includes full command line support like CDBurner. XP. The interface is clean and simple without a lot of extras to make things confusing. Infra. Recorder is a respectable burning program, but it has a few disadvantages as well. It does not support Blu- Ray discs or HD- DVDs. It also does not include many advanced options for tweaking the burn process to perfection like Img. Burn. Its interface isn’t as nice as that of Burn. Aware Free, and it doesn’t have any extra features like CDBurner. XP." Verified Tru. Portable. Alternate Products: CDBurner. XP (requires Microsoft . NET Framework) although it does have disk spanning feature which is easy to use.| Img. Burn (see steps to make it portable) | Deep. Burner (borderline portable)Best Free Portable Media Player: The KM Player (KMP) - - Home | Download | Support | Editor Review. Description: Media players are good for playing your audio and video files and CDs/DVDs. The KM Player is "easy to use and install, has awesome playback, and plays most everything without need to download extra codec packs, making it easy to use for those with less experience. Other features include setting multifarious audio and video effects, slow down or increase playback speed with regular tone, etc."First you need to click on the download file to have it self- extract to a folder of your choice. Then it requires a simple setting change in the interface to make it portable: use a right click on it anywhere > Options > Preferences > General > check "Store settings to KMPCfg. See an alternative option here. None of the media players run with stealth and variously write to the registry or user folder. Alternate Products: Media Player Classic Home. Cinema | VLC Media Player Portable. Best Free Portable Music Player and Organizer: Jaangle - - Home | Download | Forum | Editor Review. Description: Sometimes media players are not enough for music lovers, and we have to search around for a suitable music player by trial and error. Jaangle has an intuitive and user- friendly interface for playing music, an excellent library for music managing, and very interesting download capabilities of artist photos/bios, song lyrics, etc. Download and extract the "files only" version. However, it doesn't rip or convert music files, but to do that try Bon. KEnc (Tru. Portable). Alternate Products (All Tru. Portable): Foobar | AIMP 2 | XMPlay | 1by. Best Free Portable MP3 Tag Editor: Tag. Scanner - - Home | Download | Editor Review. Description: Once upon a time, I often resorted to Windows Media Player (WMP) mainly because it's rather good for the initial tasks of tagging and cover art finding. But Tag. Scanner is even better and allows me to shut down WMP for good! It "supports basic and extended tags and is complete with Music Renamer and Tag Processor. You can preview tags and cover artwork from an online database before saving. However, it does not come with a normal windows menu. You may need to spend some time to get yourself familiarized with its user interface". Verified Tru. Portable. Best Free Portable Video Editor: Avidemux - - Home | Download | Wiki | Editor Review. Description: The vendor describes Avidemux as a "free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks". It has many tutorials and guides at its Wiki to help with these tasks. It's "designed for multi- purpose video editing and processing, and can be used on almost all known operating systems and computer platforms. It's simple to use and supports many file types, including AVI, MPEG, MP4, and ASF". Writes settings to user folder. Alternate Product: Virtual. Dub (Tru. Portable)Related Portable Apps Best Free Portable Apps for Cleanup & Tuning. Best Free Portable All- in- one PC Tune- up: Comodo System Cleaner - - Home | Download | Support | Editor Review. Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Best Performance. Blocking website adverts in web browsers has been a hot topic in recent years and there are merits to both sides of the argument. Many sites out there bombard you with tons of ads, and quite often you will feel that you have no choice but to use an ad blocker because either the ads slow down the site loading too much, or they are incredibly annoying and get in the way or distract from your browsing. On the other side, there are sites that try to inconvenience you as little as possible and be sensible with the amount of ads displayed and their placement. Blanket use of ad blockers will hurt those sites just as much as the bad sites you feel have gone overboard with their ads. It’s no secret the vast majority of websites on the internet need to use ads to help pay for running costs. Staff, hardware, fast servers, fast CDNs and the like are not free and need to be paid for. But we cannot get away from the fact an ad blocker is probably the number one add- on for browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and will continue to be so for some time yet. Besides removing the adverts, ad blockers also save bandwidth by cutting down the amount of content a page loads, they can also help with your privacy by blocking scripts that track your browsing habits. There’s several ad blocking extensions available for Chrome and Firefox, and some work better than others. To see what they do when when loading a web page, we’ve decided to put a number of ad blockers to the test. This test is about the performance of an ad blocker in terms of how quickly it loads a range of ad blocked pages, the maximum amount of memory it uses and how much stress it puts on the CPU. The Ad Blockers on Test. There are many more ad blockers available in Chrome than in Firefox which is the reverse of what we expected. Here are the ones we are testing for both browsers. Ad. Block for Chrome – The most popular ad blocker for Chrome with reportedly over 2. There was a Firefox version released briefly but that was pulled from the Firefox add on pages for unknown reasons. Ad. Block has acceptable ad options for You. Tube and Google search but they are off by default. Ad. Block Plus for Chrome/Ad. Block Plus for Firefox – One of the most well known ad blockers and also one of the most controversial because Ad. Block Plus started off the trend of introducing acceptable ad whitelists. The Ad. Block Plus website also has versions for Opera, Safari, Maxthon, Internet Explorer and even Android. Ad. Block Pro for Chrome – Ad. Block Pro is based on Ad. Block Plus but has a simpler options interface and no acceptable ads option. The icon button sits in the address bar instead of the normal add on area and has 3 simple options to disable, go to options or create a filter. Adguard for Chrome/Adguard for Firefox – Adguard is easy to use and extra blocking scripts can easily be added. Adguard’s main product is a shareware desktop application that blocks ads in a number of browsers without the need for browser add- ons. Beta versions of both add- ons are available for testers. Ad. Remover for Chrome – Ad. Remover is based on Ad. Block with just about the same number of options minus the support tab. On the face of it, most of the differences appear to be cosmetic and although it doesn’t ask for donations, there are social media buttons when clicking the icon. Ghostery for Chrome/Ghostery for Firefox – Ghostery can block analytic scripts, widgets, web beacons, privacy scripts and or course advertisements. The good thing about Ghostery is the ability to individually enable or disable scripts on a per site basis. Versions are available for Opera, IE, Safari and mobile operating systems. Simply Block Ads! Chrome – This hasn’t been updated since 2. Simply Block Ads! Simple Adblock) is the easiest to use and the only option is an opt- in to send usage statistics. Super. Block Ad. Blocker for Chrome – This is another Ad. Block fork and appears to be by the same developer as Ad. Remover. Apart from an extra entry in the filter list and a few styling changes, we can’t see much difference between the two, perhaps there are more changes underneath.µ Adblock for Firefox – µ Adblock (Micro Adblock) is Easylist and Easy. Privacy based, and almost as easy as it gets. Simply click the icon to block/unblock specific sites. There are only 3 options including blocking social buttons. One issue is µ Adblock hasn’t been updated since January 2. Block Origin for Chrome/µBlock Origin for Firefox – An up and coming ad and script blocker for both Chrome and Firefox, it also claims to be very CPU and memory efficient. A lot but not too many scripts are blocked out of the box and it’s easy to use with a number of other blocklists readily available. You can also allow or block specific sites from loading on the page via advanced mode. Ad Blockers not tested. Ad. Block Edge (Firefox) – The project has now been discontinued and the author recommends µBlock Origin instead. Advert. Ban (Firefox) – Hasn’t been updated since 2. Ad. Block Lite (Chrome and Firefox) – Left a number of ads untouched on our test sites, even in the more aggressive Full mode. Various sources say the project has all but been abandoned. Ad. Block Super (Chrome) – After reading reviews and doing some testing we found that this addon actually injects ads of its own from a number of third parties. At best it’s adware, at worst it’s malware and should be avoided at all costs. Below are highlighted ads we received when visiting Amazon. Block (Chrome and Firefox) – This version is essentially a clone of the original µBlock which was later renamed µBlock Origin. The author of µBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, has since disassociated himself from the µBlock branch and no longer contributes to the project. For these reasons we will test only µBlock Origin. How We Tested the Ad Blockers. Testing websites can be tricky because ads are served by third parties so a page is depending on external servers during loading. To try and even out any inconsistencies and also any differences with other servers being used by the website, each webpage tested was refreshed 1. Then we looked at 3 different scores: Google Chrome: Page load time – An average taken for the page to load 1. We are using the Load event to time when the browser has finished retrieving all the resources required by the page. In Chrome this is a red score on the Network tab in Developer Tools. Caching is disabled so resources are refreshed each time. Peak memory usage – We watched the memory usage of the ad blocker’s process in the Chrome Task Manager (Shift+Esc), the maximum amount of Megabytes used during the 1. Peak CPU usage – Similar to memory usage, using the Chrome Task Manager the maximum percentage of CPU usage was recorded during the 1. Mozilla Firefox: Page load time – Average time taken for the page to load 1. Firefox doesn’t have a separate load event time in its Network tab like Chrome does, so we used an addon called app. Page Speed Monitor to get the times. The frustrating thing about Firefox is you cannot get accurate scores for memory or CPU usage of extensions during use because unlike Chrome, everything is loaded into a single process. The about: memory page and a few related add ons don’t give a true live score for memory usage. As a result we could only record results for page load times in Firefox. Tests were conducted on a 4. GB, Core Duo 2. 2. Ghz laptop using Wi. Fi and running Windows 7 as the operating system. Although the tests could have been run on a more powerful system, we believe the laptop will produce more representative scores for the average computer. All ad blockers were installed and used with their default settings, nothing else was changed. The only exception is Ghostery which runs a wizard on startup where you need to choose what to block, for that we selected only the Advertising blocking option. Chrome 4. 4 and Firefox 4. Next we’ll test 1.
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