Re:What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective
by Stratoscope on Sunday January 14, 2018 @03:11PM
(#16146091)
I'm not sure what not being endorsed means in this context, but I distinctly remember Microsoft going to considerable work back in the days of Windows 2000 to support per-user installations.
The big change was in the registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT was no longer a direct shortcut to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes, but instead was a dynamically merged view of that key and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes.
This allowed you to register COM objects for the current user without requiring administrative privileges.
I and many other people were doing per-user installs long before Chrome existed.
This is especially useful for apps that auto-update. If you install in Program Files [(x86)] then you will pop a UAC prompt every time the app updates. If you install per-user it can be a silent update.
The big change was in the registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT was no longer a direct shortcut to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes, but instead was a dynamically merged view of that key and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes.
This allowed you to register COM objects for the current user without requiring administrative privileges.
I and many other people were doing per-user installs long before Chrome existed.
This is especially useful for apps that auto-update. If you install in Program Files [(x86)] then you will pop a UAC prompt every time the app updates. If you install per-user it can be a silent update.