What are the advantages of installing programs in

Question

I just noticed that Chromium was installed in AppData in both Vista and XP. If Google does that and if other applications does this, than is that becuase there is some form of protection? Should we write installers that does the same thing as Google?

Answer 1

One advantage nobody mentioned are silent auto-updates. Chrome has an updater process that runs all the time and immediately updates your chrome installation.

I think their use-case is non-standard. They need a way to fix vulnerability issues (since it's a browser) as soon as possible. Waiting for admins approving every single update company-wide, is simply not good enough.

Answer 2

Windows 7 and Windows Installer 5.0 provide real per-user installation capabilities now.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd408068%28VS.85%29.aspx

You can sort of fudge it in Vista and XP by using ~/AppData/Local or the equivalent like Chrome does. Microsoft themselves use this for the ClickOnce installers.

So at least on Windows 7 and beyond the solution is simple.