A browser build per profile

The browser version is part of what a site reads about you. It stands in the browser line, in the client hints and in the features a page can test for.

With one engine for the whole app, an update moves every profile to a new version on the same day. Twenty accounts changing browser together is the pattern a platform reads as one person at one machine.

A warmed account has a history of versions behind it, and that history is supposed to move the way one person's browser moves. So the build belongs to the profile.

A build is a folder named by its version with the browser program inside it. The app keeps them in its own data folder, one folder per version.

A folder with nothing runnable inside is not offered at all, so an interrupted copy never looks like a working build.

• The name is the version

  Two to four numbers with dots. A folder called latest, or one that climbs out of the kernels folder, is refused.

• The program is found by name

  ARMANOS Browser.app on a Mac, armanos-browser.exe or chrome.exe on Windows, chrome on Linux.

• Newest first

  Versions are compared as numbers, so 99 never sorts above 153.

• The row carries its weight

  Size on disk and the names of the profiles pinned to it stand on the same line.

You unpack a build into a folder and point the app at that folder. Nothing is downloaded for you here.

1. 1

   You name the version

   The field takes digits and dots and turns down anything else before a file is touched.

2. 2

   The folder is copied

   Cleaning out Downloads later changes nothing, because the build now lives inside the app.

3. 3

   A half copy is thrown away

   The copy lands beside the target and is renamed into place only after the program is found inside it.

4. 4

   A version already here is refused

   Installing over a build that profiles may be pinned to is turned down instead of overwriting it.

A profile with a pinned build opens on that build, whatever the Engine screen holds for everything else.

The version claimed to a site is asked of that program itself. Only when the program answers nothing does the folder name stand in, so a folder named wrongly and a binary that will not report make a profile claim a version it does not run.

A profile can carry a pin for a build this computer never had, because a profile record moves between machines far more easily than a browser build does. Quietly handing it another one would put an account in front of a browser version it has never seen.

So it is named twice: in red at the top of the Engine screen with the profiles that are waiting, and in the notification list at the moment such a profile opens.

In the profile card the version stays where you put it, marked as not installed here, rather than falling back to the default and losing your choice.

Profiles run on one of two engines: the ARMANOS Browser build, or the built-in Chromium the app falls back to. Pinning belongs to the first of them.

With the app set to the built-in engine a profile opens through that instead, and a pinned build sits unused until you switch back.

A build that no profile in the list is pinned to is removed with its folder. A build one of them is pinned to is not, and the refusal names those profiles. A profile waiting in the recycle bin is not in that list, so its build can go while it waits there.

The alternative is finding out tomorrow, when a window does not open the way it did yesterday and nothing on screen connects that to a folder you tidied away.