From Newsgroup: alt.privacy
On Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:35:36 +0100, wasbit wrote :
What is wrong with getting Aloha from its home page?
- https://alohabrowser.app/download.html
Then, why must I save/install to C: ? Is this mandatory?
I ask because it's Windows 10/11 only. Won't install on W 8.1.
Hi wasbit,
You've helped us all a lot over the decades we've all been on this
newsgroup, so you deserve good answers.
The huge cost of freeware is in the time it takes to find good ones.
The sad fact is I've just spent about, oh, a few hours on this free Aloha,
VPN browser, and I'm still tweaking it, so your two questions I'll answer,
but your questions are the LEAST of the problem. Just wait and see.
First, allow me to courteously answer your perfectly valid 2 questions:
Q1: Why can't I get aloha from the home page?
A1: You can. I didn't even know it was there. I just grabbed it from the
first place that I found it. So that was MY MISTAKE. I should have done a search for the CANONICAL download. Mea culpa. I did not do that.
You can check the HASH though to see if it's the same as mine was.
Now for your second quite valid & perfectly reasonable question...
Q2: why must I save/install to C: ? Is this mandatory?
A2: Well, that's three questions! :)
A2a: You can save the archive anywhere.
A2b: I'm not sure you can install anywhere though.
I want to install into C:\app\browser\chromium\aloha\aloha.exe
But almost all Chromium-based browsers won't let you do that.
So you need to install, as far as I know, where it wants to go.
For me... that's this location based on the desktop shortcut target. "%localappdata%\Aloha Mobile\Aloha\Application\aloha.exe"
Now we get to the problems I've been spending hours on solving.
The first is that I'm piling a VPN on top of a VPN (or proxy).
When I use a free system VPN (such as vpngate.net), that works fine.
Aloha thinks I'm at the vpngate.net VPN IP address. So that works.
But when I add a free socks5 proxy (with or without the system VPN), it
took me a while to figure out that Aloha (and URBrowser) won't use it.
That is, I can run Psiphon free SOCKS5 proxy, but it turns out to be
IMPOSSIBLE to get either Aloha or URBrowser to respect it.
The funny thing is Mozzilla browsers (like Firefox) have no problem
respecting the Socks5 proxy, and Brave (which is a Chromium-based browser)
also respects the Socks5 proxy (but Ungoogled Chromium won't respect it).
So that took a while to iron out simply because it makes no logical sense.
Note that I'm NOT talking about the system-wide Aloha VPN; I'm talking
about the VPN that is built into just the Aloha browser (which is kind of
sort of like an extension that is built into the Aloha browser by default).
Then, I realized unless you pay money, you get the default VPN proxy inside
of Aloha, which I tried changing but it doesn't let you change it for free,
so that's no big deal.
Then I found out belatedly that I wasn't on the Aloha built-in browser VPN every time because it DEFAULTS to being off. It's easy enough to turn on,
since you just click the light-blue shield at the left of the URL and it
turns dark blue - but I didn't know that when you turn on "TrafficMask"
that it turns of the VPN. It took me a while to figure out you get one, or
you get the other, so since VPN is better than TrafficMask, it's kind of
like having a button that nobody should ever use (unless speed is critical,
I guess, but the VPN is fast enough so it's a button that shouldn't be
there, kind of like the elevator levers in the Disney cartoon El Dorado).
OK. Don't turn Aloha TrafficMask on. Easy enough. If you know it.
But wait. There's more...
Since you want to always clear the cookies (at least I do on all browsers,
and since Mozilla browsers are brain dead when it comes to clearing cookies
but Chromium browsers are a breeze, so I set it to open to:
On Startup... Open a specific page or set of pages:
aloha://settings/clearBrowserData
No problem. Right? Every chrome browser does that (even as every Mozilla browser is brain dead 'cuz they hate when you clear cookies, I guess).
But wait, that's TWO button clicks you wanna do when you start Aloha.
1. First, click the big fat blue "DELETE" cookies button.
2. Then, click the gray VPN shield to turn it blue (which means VPN is on)
Well, I hate button clicks. I'm allergic to them, in fact, so I installed
https://www.autohotkey.com/download/ahk-v2.exe
into C:\software\hardware\autohotkey\AutoHotkey_2.0.19_setup.exe
Name: AutoHotkey_2.0.19_setup.exe
Size: 3032064 bytes (2961 KiB)
SHA256: FD55129CBD356F49D2151E0A8B9662D90D2DBBB9579CC2410FDE38DF94787A3A
And I wanted to install it into C:\app\hardware\autohotkey\AutoHotkey.exe
But that would be too easy.
ERROR! AutoHotkey Setup:
Enabling UI Access will not be possible because the
installation directory is not a sub-directory of Program Files.
Without UI Access, non-elevated scripts cannot interact with
windows of elevated programs.
<
https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v2/FAQ.htm#UIAccess>
Sigh. So I installed AutoHotkey where it wanted to go.
C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey
Now I had to create a C:\data\sys\ahk\aloha_vpn.ahk script.
This script took HOURS to create.
Not because it was hard.
Because I didn't know that every time you close Aloha, it writes to the Preferences file the last known coordinates of the browser and then it
consults that Preferences file to open up the next time where you were.
Who knew?
Not me!
Aloha is saving the last known position of the browser window here:
gvim %localappdata%\Aloha Mobile\Aloha\User Data\Default\Preferences
"browser": {
"window_placement": {
"bottom": 1134,
"left": -257,
"maximized": false,
"right": 653,
"top": 74,
"work_area_bottom": 1080,
"work_area_left": 69,
"work_area_right": 1920,
"work_area_top": 0
}
}
Bear in mind that Preferences file is a billion lines lone. Oh wait. Did I
say a billion lines long? Nope. It's one line long of a billion characters.
Have fun FINDING that section in the Preferences with "findstr".
So I spent HOURs chasing those coordinates with the AutoHotKey
Window Spy program (C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\WindowSpy.ahk)
until I realized the SIMPLEST solution was to make the Preferences
file READ ONLY! (Yeah, I know. That's sophomoric. But I didn't feel like writing programs to write to the Preferences file my starting window coordinates, so I punted out of frustration & just made it read only.)
Here's just my most recent of the permutations of that darn script:
; C:\data\sys\ahk\aloha_vpn.ahk version 3.0 20250910
; Launches the freeware Aloha VPN Browser [Version 4.9.0.0 (64-bit)]
; "%localappdata%\Aloha Mobile\Aloha\Application\aloha.exe"
; (Uses a read-only Preferences file to lock window position)
; "browser": {
; "window_placement": {
; "bottom": 1134,
; "left": -257,
; "maximized": false,
; "right": 653,
; "top": 74,
; "work_area_bottom": 1080,
; "work_area_left": 69,
; "work_area_right": 1920,
; "work_area_top": 0
; },
; "ui_click_targets": {
; "delete_data_button": { "x": 1080, "y": 801 },
; "vpn_shield_icon": { "x": 602, "y": 75 }
; }
;
; Then it:
; 1. Clicks "Delete data" on aloha://settings/clearBrowserData
; Screen coordinates: 1080, 801
; 2. Clicks the VPN shield icon to turn it on
; Screen coordinates: 602, 75
; These coordinates are absolute screen positions (CoordMode "Screen")
; and assume the locked-in window placement from the Preferences file.
; Step 1: Launch Aloha VPN Browser
Run "%localappdata%\Aloha Mobile\Aloha\Application\aloha.exe"
; Step 2: Wait for the browser window to appear
WinWait "ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1",, 10
Sleep 2000 ; extra time for page to render
; Step 3: Set mouse coordinates to screen mode
CoordMode "Mouse", "Screen"
; Step 4: Click "Delete data" button
Click 1080, 801
Sleep 1500 ; wait for deletion to complete
; Step 5: Click VPN shield icon
Click 602, 75
Sleep 1000
; Step 6: Exit script
Exit
(Note I don't remember if I synced all the coordinates in the comments.)
At this point, I have the following set up:
a. When I want to start aloha, I run aloha_vpn.ahk
b. That calls Aloha
c. Which reads the read-only preferences
d. Which sets the location of the aloha browser window
e. Which starts up to aloha://settings/clearBrowserData
f. Which AutoHotKey will click the big blue DELETE button
g. And then AutoHotKey will click the gray shield to turn VPN on
Whew!
If something takes three clicks, we should drop it by a third to two and if
it takes two clicks we should drop it in half to one click. I'm still
debugging as I have to make sure I don't already have an iconified Aloha session already running 'cuz it can write to its cache of the Preferences.
Who knew all these complexities existed just trying to start up a free VPN
web browser and have a bunch of buttons get clicked automatically.
I'm not done yet, but I'm almost there (which I've been saying for hours).
Let me know if you have questions as it's noble for all of us to have a
bunch of free VPN browsers, where the VPN browsers I know of are
1. Epic (it's defunct at the moment, but it was my daily drive for years)
2. Opera (which is fine & which starts with the VPN turned on)
3. Aloha (which I'm working on automating the VPN turned on)
4. URBrowser (which I haven't even started automating yet)
5. Any others?
Note: We won't count the Tor Browser Bundle as it's a different beast.
Nor do we count things like Brave with VPN extensions (since that's also a different beast than a browser which, by default, is a VPN browser).
As always, ask questions so everyone learns from our efforts.
And as always, add value if you know of VPN browser freeware.
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