These portable applications are intended to be used from removable storage devices such as USB flash drives.

[1] PortableApps.com started out as a Haller's personal website hosting a portable version of Mozilla Firefox in March 2004.

The open-source group of portable programs outgrew his personal website and he moved it to a community site, PortableApps.com.

[4] The site currently hosts various projects created by forum members, and is also used for bug reporting and suggestions.

[8] The PortableApps.com Launcher (also known as PAL) is used to make applications portable by handling path redirection, environment variable changes, file and directory movement, configuration file path updates.