How to get Google Chrome without installing it?

How about Chromium? It's "the open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser".

Go to the build page, choose your platform, choose a build (larger number means newer), download the zip file, then extract and run! Perfect for me.

Portable apps is your best solution to this problem.

The portable apps .paf file is technically a .zip file with a different extension.

To clarify how a portable apps installation works:

When you install the app to a flash drive with portable apps on it, all entries that would normally go into the windows registry, are in fact written to files within the portable apps system. Additionally, any files that might have been installed on the C drive, despite you specifying a D drive installation path, are also installed to your portable apps flash drive.

What you are looking for: an exe file you can download and just run; is rarely done these days in the world of programming. Sorry, but that is just the way most programs are developed. It is the primary reason that environments such as portableApps were developed.

The primary reason for the current install and write to the registry environment was to prevent people from bootlegging programs by simply copying the program folder from one location to the other which was very common during the dos/windows 3.1/Win96 days.

By the way, portableApps.com is not the only flash drive environment that makes programs portable. But it is likely the one that's most popular.

To test the non install portability of GoogleChromePortable, I copied the GoogleChromePortable folder from my portableApps drive to my D double clicked GoogleChromePortable.exe file to run Chrome and the it started without any problems. I could also go to various websites with it. So all you really have to do is decompress the portableapps.paf file to a folder on your C or D drive and run the program.

Take care.

You might also consider some de-googled chrome derivatives which have portable versions:

• Iridium Browser https://iridiumbrowser.de/downloads
• Ungoogled Chromium https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/