Run Firefox from removable media

[medicine]

This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media, such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that don't have Firefox installed. It has only been tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Copy the Firefox application folder and your profile folder to the removable medium. In this example we will use R:\Firefox for the application folder and R:\FFProfile as the profile folder, assuming the drive letter for the removable media is R:.

2. Create a simple batch file called R:\Firefox.bat with the following line:

start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile

3. Optionally, disable the disk cache to reduce the amounts of file writes to the removable storage by entering about:config in the address field of Firefox and set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.

The reason why a batch file is needed instead of a simple shortcut is that a shortcut uses absolute paths, and since the actual drive letter for the removable media may change depending on which computer it is plugged into, the relative path used in the batch file is guaranteed to work anywhere

[medicine]

Locate your profile folder

Before the configuration files are presented, you should know how to find your profile folder, which is where Firefox saves all your settings on your hard drive.

* On Windows XP/2000, the path is usually %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[user Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and the rest should be obvious.

* On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

* On Linux, the path is usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/

* On Mac OS X, the path is usually ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/

Firefox is capable of handling more than one user and thus, more than one profile. The path examples above refers to the default profile that is automatically created when you start Firefox for the first time. You can manage any number of profiles by using the Profile Manager.

[bromptonista]

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/

Υπάρχει ειδική διανομή για usb disks που δε χρειάζεται και πολλά-πολλά. Υπάρχει και διανομή του Thunderbird για να κουβαλάς και τα mail σου μαζί (αν δεν έχεις GMail )

This project is an official MozDev project

and will also be hosted at this address:

portablefirefox.mozdev.org

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more (Note: It will not run from read-only media like a CD-R, but Portable Firefox Live will). This grew out of a mozillaZine forum topic (now split in two: original, followup) back in June of 2004. Any comments or questions can be directed to the current Portable Firefox mozillaZine thread. You'll find me in the forums as CritterNYC. You may also be interested in learning about Portable Thunderbird, Portable Sunbird and Portable NVU.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderbird/

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_sunbird/

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_nvu/