Standalone version of Chrome (for development)

Question

I use the stable version of Google Chrome as my default browser on my system. I now need to work on a project requiring the development version of Chrome, yet I do not wish to replace my system install of Chrome.

Does there exist a standalone package of Chome which can be unpacked into a folder and executed entirely from there? Ie, it should not require anything to be installed, it should not touch the profile associated with my installed version of Chrome. I should be able to download different versions of this into different folders, and be sure that they do not conflict with each other..

(Ideally we could package up prototype builds complete with a copy of this version of Chrome. These packages would then be as self contained as a desktop application...)

Answer 1

Simply get the portable version, it does what as you need.

Answer 2

I believe Chrome on Windows installs itself into the Application Data (/Users on Win7) folder of a user. While I can't test this at the moment, try creating a new user account, install Chrome, then log into your other account. Then try running both at the same time. Might be a bit hard to find the executable.

Another option would be to run it in a VM. More expensive versions of Win7 have this somewhat built-in (you need to download an XP image from Microsoft, but the VM software is pre-installed, I think) but you can also install VirtualBox + your own ISO. On a decent computer system, you shouldn't get too much of a performance hit.

A really silly way of doing this is installing the multiple concurrent users Remote Desktop hack, Remote Desktopping to your own computer (if that's possible) and running the second Chrome install as a different user.

Answer 3

You could download the Chromium flavour (which is the open source browser that runs Google Chrome). You can download the latest and greatest from:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/continuous/LATEST/

If you have specific dates/revision that you want to download, you can pick them from:

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/continuous/

That will not interfere with the current version of Chrome, instead it will be using Chromium folder structure (chrome replaced with chromium everywhere).