Add option to install to alternative location

[thesohelshaikh]

The setup automatically installs onto the default location which may not be a very good choice for people with low storage or a small SSD.

Solution 1: Allow users to change the install location while setup.
Solution 2: Provide an alternative way to download, you can put up several releases users can download and place it in a preferred location. (Portable prebuilt version)

[bengaywins]

And can we have an all users option too? If one were to install this just in a user's app data folder, this means you could have 30 installs of the same application. This is dumb.

[srirambv]

This is a known issue on Chrome as well which was logged (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113987) in 2012 and still not fixed.

cc: @bbondy

[thesohelshaikh]

Considering Brave is open source, i hope it gets fixed. Chrome is goto browser for me and I can’t afford another browser running on my SSD.

[srirambv]

+1 from @marseye via #1143

[Neustradamus]

Any news?

Folder choice, for actual user, all users and standalone.

[bsclifton]

@Neustradamus no update as far as I know

In the meantime (as a work-around), you should be able to symlink this on Windows using junctions. For example, if you know it'll install to C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\, create a junction for that to where you'd like

Some more detailed info at: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/278262-mklink-create-use-links-windows.html

[dadagama]

year 2020,
victim of small ssd hard drive.
i hope this can be fixed

[dw-0]

@bsclifton
Almost 2 years have passed and there is still a force install on C.

I wanted to give Brave a try, but noticing it installing on C without having an option to change that made me immediately uninstall it again.

You guys really don't care, do you?

[bsclifton]

@th33xitus I'm definitely sorry if you got the impression we don't care ☹️ We do - but there are so many things being tracked for the project. It always comes down to priorities - for example getting a stable version of Sync (sync v2), upgrading Chromium, fixing crashes, fixing bugs (versus enhancements), and a lot more (over 2,200 issues at the time this is being written). And unfortunately, there are only a certain number of employees able to grab work

This is a great one that I would love to work with a contributor on. The BraveSetup.exe stub installer on Windows downloads the mini-installer.exe from Omaha. That should be containing the logic for where default install path is. We'd need to make this configurable and then come up with a UI (or add an optional command line flag)

cc: @rebron for help prioritizing this issue

[RottenSod]

Uninstalling Brave until this issue is fixed.
Bye.

[sectoidleader]

I saw Firefox is laying off even more people, saw a comment pointing to Brave, downloaded, installed, uninstalled immediately when I couldn't pick where it installed. Looked for an offline installer, installed again, immediately uninstalled when I couldn't pick where it installed.

Then I reinstalled the browser and just cut the BraveSoftware folder out of "Program Files (x86)," renamed it, and put it where I wanted it. So far it seems to be working (still on the same drive, though, so YMMV).

Hopefully the browser itself exceeds these first impressions.

[bsclifton]

@sectoidleader you may need to edit some registry for that to work completely (ex: on updates) - but that is a legit work-around

Try snooping around HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\BraveSoftware to see if there are any paths referencing the Program Files (x86) version of the path and you should be able to update those. You'll likely want to close Brave before making that change (after quitting, you can check for BraveUpdate.exe process in task manager and kill those too)

[dw-0]

@bsclifton
Are there any more changes need to be done? Especially more folders which get created during the install and fill up the c drive except the Brave folder itself?

Are there any further restrictions to the functionality of Brave if i manually move Brave and edit the registry? If stuff works that way, i would give Brave a second chance. A little bit of fiddling around is no issue for me if the program then runs fine.
Though i still hope a custom install location is still on the roadmap.

[bsclifton]

@th33xitus no- that should be it 😄

[dw-0]

@bsclifton fyi: updates aren't possible with the workaround

now i need to figure out somehow how to get the latest stable binaries for updating it manually...

[thesohelshaikh]

Will this be ever worked upon? It has been over 2 years now. I tried using it on my main SSD for a long time and the browser has a huge memory footprint.

Sadly, I am switching over to Firefox until this is addressed.

[HyugAG0d]

come on fix this already @bsclifton it`s been 2 yrs.

[iBeny]

Will UNINSTALL Brave since we can't choose the installation path...

[bigben2159]

I copy all the files from C to D , its working , maybe later on I will have problems or not.

[Dev-i-l]

+1

[SevastianGit]

@Neustradamus no update as far as I know

In the meantime (as a work-around), you should be able to symlink this on Windows using junctions. For example, if you know it'll install to C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\, create a junction for that to where you'd like

Some more detailed info at: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/278262-mklink-create-use-links-windows.html

This worked for me surprisingly well, although I had to go further than just reading that post (My work with command prompt was messy, confusing and didn't work at all), in the comment section of the guide, I found an awesome app called "Junction Link Magic", it's basically a nice GUI for making Junctions, the link for the software was dead but using the wayback machine, I found the latest archive available of the app and found it, you can download it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107052214/http://users.telenet.be/jbranders/linkmagic2.exe (Home page of the app: https://web.archive.org/web/20180201151957/http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm)
I have another partition for all of my files and software, so after I downloaded and installed it on my windows 8.1 laptop (For windows 10 you can try compatibility mode if it doesn't work normally) I made the following junctions by pressing the "Create.." button (Junction point -> Destination):
Edit: DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, DETAILS ON THE BOTTOM OF THIS COMMENT
C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware -> D:\Software\Brave
C:\Program Files (x86)\BraveSoftware -> D:\Software\Brave x86 (Temp, updates, etc.)
C:\Users\ [Username here] \AppData\Local\BraveSoftware -> D:\Files\AppData\Brave

NOTE: The Junction point folders MUST BE EMPTY to make a junction, so, if you already have Brave installed (If you decided to live with it or whatever), close Brave, copy the contents of the folders somewhere else and put them back after making the junctions, the destination doesn't have to be empty.

The destination can be changed to any preferred location of your choice, just make sure to put them into separate folders like I did, to make sure Brave fully works, you have to make each one of those junction points I showed above, I haven't tried updating Brave yet, but once a new update comes out, I'll tell how it worked out, but theoretically, it should work just fine, I personally just created the BraveSoftware folders myself before installing Brave (I am on a new machine) and only then opened the setup.exe, worked perfectly well.
If you have any questions, or don't understand something, just reply and I'll try to help.
Hope this helps! :D

Edit: Hmmm.. apparently, the windows action server asked me to search my drive for errors and found some, I restarted so it could do it's thing, and it deleted the C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware junction point.. bravesoftware folder was deleted and it only was kept in the destination, I did the junction again and my laptop seems to be acting a bit .weird... odd, will update more on this later...

Update: Well... sfc found some corrupted files or whatever... I guess do this at your own risk and if you do tell me your outcomes, they could be different on different machines and OS' I think I'll do a fresh reinstall since I've got no files to lose:/

[Neustradamus]

@SevastianGit: Thanks but it is not a "legal" solution.

[SevastianGit]

@SevastianGit: Thanks but it is not a "legal" solution.

Why not? If you're talking about the Junction Link Magic software it was free to download in the first place (check the linked home site), the site just got taken down or resold but thankfully I've found an archive of it on the wayback machine and managed to download it that way, so it is absolutely legal if you mean in that way.

[bsclifton]

Thanks for the comments folks - I'm going to clean up this ticket a bit to leave on-topic comments and will lock it for the moment. Updating the installer to offer a place to pick location isn't a quick fix unfortunately. If someone wanted to look into this I could definitely help answer questions

cc: @rebron in case we wanted to raise priority on this ticket