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Make Google Chrome Portable the system default browser

Making Chrome Portable the system default browser turned out to be more complicated than I'd expected.

I am currently running Windows 7 x64. I first tried Change Default Browser, which seems to be the tool recommended by everybody, but that didn't work for some reason. I tried a few other methods, but none of them worked. Finally I found salvation in this discussion, in the last post made by jonasformolo.

What is needed is to created the chrome.reg file, then fire up the text editor and replace all occurrences of:

  D:\\Softwares\\Portable\\Extracted\\GoogleChromePortable\\GoogleChromePortable.exe

with the full path to Chrome Portable on your system (mind the double backslashes!). Finally double-click to enter it into the registry.

However, there is one additional and crucial step to take which is missing in the original instructions. Since you can't easily edit the value in:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\GoogleChromePortableURL\shell\open\command

with a text editior (unless you have the unusual skill of being able to edit Unicode strings in pure hex), you need to fire up REGEDIT to change the path value.

Now run "Control Panel" and select "Default Programs". If you have done everything right so far, you should see this:



Now simply click on "Set this program as default", and Chrome Portable will be set as the system default browser.
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Comments

  1. Cristian Dragos18 October 2012 at 13:11

    thanks for sharing this... was exactly what I was looking for!
    I can confirm this method works also with X-Chromium.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brian8 February 2013 at 12:00

    Thank you so much for the clear instructions! I can confirm this works for a single user on Windows 7 x64. I have yet to add my wife's account and am wondering if this will work under multiple account situations using different portable installations.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous26 February 2013 at 15:23

    thx!!! it worked

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous21 November 2013 at 06:32

    Thanks :]

    Instead of the extra step to edit the hex() string in the registry I just replaced it in the file with non-hex():

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\GoogleChromePortableURL\shell\open\command]
    ""="\"B:\\PortableApps\\GoogleChromePortable\\GoogleChromePortable.exe\" -url \"%1\""

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown9 January 2015 at 09:15

    Awesome! It works fine.

    ReplyDelete
  6. XPloRR12 November 2015 at 13:48

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  7. XPloRR12 November 2015 at 13:49

    Works for Chromium Portable as well, but you should also change the path to the icon manually! ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Peter_Webfan15 January 2016 at 10:43

    Thanks that works great :) and thanks for the coment from @altendky :)

    ReplyDelete

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