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You mean to tell me that this has never been covered before on Slashdot? Are you kidding?

Or am I just being naive? I guess the slogan is true - Slashdot. The News 24 Hours After Everyone Else Or Your Money Back!

As an aside - why not mention Portable Firefox or FFDeploy? They fit the same category of spreading firefox.

heard of portable openoffice? http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_ope noffice/

I use Thunderbid for 8 different IMAP accounts, that I can easily check and switch between. Not to mention moving messages between them or to my local mail store. All in a secure client that remembers my passwords to all of them. And created Portable Thunderbird so I can do it from the road, too. Without needing to lug my laptop. And without needing to resort to a crappy webmail interface that is a not-so-close approximation of the features and functionality of a local mail client.

...are here here.

Also, from the Mozillazine article, looks like Portable Firefox has been updated as well.

And I'm posting this with 1.0.7, good times...

Or, ummm... it will be like that soon:

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderb ird/
Future Plans ...

        * Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use ...

That would be awesome. Almost like a "Portable Thunderbird".

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderb ird/

Some evildoers use Portable Firefox which doesnt even save the history to the computer. Or show that a browser has been used at all.

http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/
A knoppix cd or a usb drive will soon become criminal equipment

If you're not allowed to install Firefox, you might be able to run it off of a USB key -- investigate Portable Firefox.

Don't forget that OpenOffice.org has another advantage over Microsoft office... it's portable. Due to it's open source nature, I was able to create a portable version of it (without having to worry about licensing fees, etc). It runs from any removable drive (USB thumbdrive, CDRW, iPod, etc) and is fully functional (though the Java-based stuff won't work if Java isn't installed on the host PC).

http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_ope noffice/

This says that Gecko browsers overall have been growing in popularity every month. In fact, all major browser engines, including IE6, have been gaining share at the expense of IE5.

Portable Firefox, baby.

I guess that was three words. Anyway, drop it onto your hard drive, and you'll never have to care what your IT nazis think about Firefox. It runs without installing.

Subversively yours,

Sean

Maybe you need this.

Actually you don't. There is a portable version of firefox. Simply put it on a usb flash drive (I have one sitting on my iPod Shuffle, along with some music) or even burn it to a CD, and you can use firefox wherever you take the drive or CD. No hardware license neccessary :-) I'm not sure you can even have this kind of secure, roaming profile with IE.

Depends. . .

e.g. At work, where software installs aren't permitted on the main machines, I use Portable Firefox rather than a normal install.

Another way to look at it is that Firefox is the Linux kernel and the various extensions you can get for it are the "distros" - the same product at the heart, but very different ways of looking & acting.

So I'd say Linux already *IS* like Firefox, different flavours and all!

I think they've upped it from something like 100,000 writes, to 1,000,000 writes. But still, certain operations (like using junk mail filtering in Portable Thunderbird, according to its keeper, John Haller), can involve thousands of writes per operation. That stat seems dubious, but I'm not an expert in solid-state memory. http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderb ird/

What I'd like to see is a utility that tracks the writes to your flash drives, and reports how many are (probably) left.

To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing. I don't think that was true even in 1955. Snake oil salesmen have a longer history, and plenty of quack cures were touted by Madison Avenue long before that.

The Persistent Identification Element is just another example of the lengths marketing scum will go to clandestinely as possible track your movements and sell your data to anyone with a check book. Not that most users shouldn't realize by now that any plugin is likely to be some form of tracking/spyware. For those of you unfortunate enough to be trapped on IE, Flash Disable is a handy tool, its just a pretty front end to disabling & enabling the registry key for flash - one less icon that doing it with importing reg keys manually: Handy Reg Keys Way, both of them require a browser restart to take effect though. Of course, aside from flash being really annoying - its more effective to get to the root of the security problem itself with the security settings panel for Macromedia Flash Player, but you have to flip through several different settings to actually disable them and delete existing ones (under "allow websites to store information how much information on your computer"): Flash Settings Manager. Or perhaps you would like the more permanent fix of: Uninstalling Flash Player Entirely For those using Mozilla and Firefox, you likely already have Flashblock installed, but you should still check out the security settings for Flash.

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

Personally, I was more than a bit disheartened when I first found out about how much of OOo 2.0 required Java. While Portable OpenOffice 1.1.4 worked quite well on machines without Sun's JRE installed, I was rather worried how Portable OpenOffice 2.0 would fare (just compiled a test alpha using the latest UPX beta, etc). If they split out a version that didn't require Java installed, I'd probably base Portable OpenOffice on that instead.

Note that all of your extensions, bookmarks, themes etc are stored in one directory (on Windows, it's in %appdata%/firefox/, or something - I do't have access to a Windows machine right now) so you just need to carry this directory around with you - no need to manually install extensions etc every time you do a new install.

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

It rules. Installing extensions is a bit of a pain (explained on his site), but if you really have that many copies of FF floating around, this may be the best option for you.

Can't you plug in a Keychain?

I know where my wife works they won't let her use USB ports, which is a real bind when it comes to taking files to work sometimes.

It depends on how many people install it and how many people have downloaded versions 1.0, 1.0.1, etc.

I don't download from there anyway. At work I use Portable Firefox, and at home I use the MOOX builds.

I'd say you could safely estimate 60% of those are unique with about 35% of them keeping it installed and in use. [No flames, please; I'm just guessing.]

On the Portable Thunderbird project site, there was a mention that Thunderbird's adaptive junkmail filter can use "1,000 to 3,000 I/O writes just for marking a message as junk", making it a bad function to enable for flash media.
A lifetime of 10k to 100k write cycles seems like a lot, until one has a good way of determining just how many write/erase cycles go into some forms of data access.

I havent started work yet and am still in education at the moment but, even though the school is mainly M$ XP based, i think one of the network servers runs off Linux.

There is also OpenOffice on some of the computers which is very good when i transfer work from my laptop with MandrakeLinux on it. There is also GIMP on the network too and I think the head of the IT department was thinking about installing FireFox or Mozilla over the network. I tried using portable firefox on my USB pen once but the proxy server is really restricting and let me to bugger all.

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

Can anyone tell me if the idea of a USB Flashdrive browser would be any less secure?

They would be more expensive, but surely a 56MB flash drive for secure online banking would be worth the equivalent of about $12 U.S. to someone who really wanted to do their online banking.

Besides that, it would solve the update problem that everyone is rightfully griping about.

Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.

This is an issue, actually. I've written a page on Safe Portable App-ing that outlines some general guidelines that will help to minimize the risk (and keep it as non-geeky as possible). You'd still be at risk for any nasties that aren't yet know by the A/V software. And, of course, you're always at risk for keylogging and network sniffing on the machine you are using. It's best to keep all this in mind while you're using it.

All that said, there are some USB-based A/V products in the works and some other methods of ensuring application integrity (think hash-checking of all installed apps).

this may seem slightly off-topic, but one of the reasons I love thunderbird is Portable thunderbird. The ability to port the entire application wherever I want is great. You don't just have to run it off a USB-key: I run it off of a shared network drive and it works great (I can access it on any computer easily, and I don't have to use the email application otherwise supplied at work). Now the on-topic part: I think this new groupware standard has the possibility of allowing moderately techno-savvy computer users (and business-people) to access what they need in a portable fashion. Portable Thunderbird + Portable Sunbird + Good Groupware Standards will allow much simpler connectivity when you're on the road and forced to use someone else's computer. I want Sunbird to be as powerful (and portable) as thunderbird, and I think this standard is a step in the right direction.

No need to use IE. With the 200MBs of space alloted to electrical engineering students I have both Win32 and Linux Firefox binaries running the same user profile mapped to the network drive. There is also a version that can run off of a USB key here

Can we get a realistic test? Lets see how quick IE is after a couple of days browsing some of the.... less family friendly websites. Firefox would rape it hands down.

Internet Explorer can be *very* secure by setting the slider to highest as demonstrated here:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/ie_security_humor /

You can unzip Portable Firefox into a subfolder of your Windows profile directory and run it from there, with no installation required. I did this at my last job when I found myself stuck behind a locked-down XP machine and it worked great.

Yeah. Solution's called Portable Firefox.

Portable Firefox. You can just unzip it into your personal filespace and run it from there.

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

perhaps run Portable Firefox off a thumbdrive?

Been using Portable Firefox and Thunderbird for a few weeks already, and they're great for taking your settings with you wherever you go.

Been using Portable Firefox and Thunderbird for a few weeks already, and they're great for taking your settings with you wherever you go.

Portable firefox - no it won't cure [Jeff Lash's ?] incredible lack of clue, but it will let you run a decent browser without installing anything.

Then you should have a look at portable firefox: http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/ or here http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/ (within the next week)

Portable Thunderbird 1.0 is available already at http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_thunderb ird/. Now that's speedy :) I finally have a use for my old 32MB usb key!

Portable Thunderbird 1.0 is available already at . Now that's speedy :) I finally have a use for my old 32MB usb key!

I wondered when this would eventually get posted to the front page of /. John Haller has also started work on Portable Sunbird so you can keep your calendars and task schedules with you on the go. It is currently at Alpha1, and is just a launcher and instructions on how to set it up, but it works.


Portable Sunbird (USB Drive-Friendly)

Also, although it only supports devices running embedded Linux, their is another project at the Mozilla Foundation called MiniMo (for Mini Mozilla) that allows you to run either of the Mozilla browsers on your handheld. This currently only supports ARM devices. A version of this to run on ARM/Xscale with PocketPC2002+ is probably going to be released in the future, by what I have gathered.

MiniMo Project

I am not sure how much of this is redundant information, as I haven't read through all the comments yet.

• Portable Firefox - Web browser
• Portable Thunderbird - Email client
• Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
• Portable NVU - HTML Editor

• OpenOffice (PDF) - Office Suite
• Miranda IM - Instant messaging
• FileZilla - FTP

• Portable Firefox - Web browser
• Portable Thunderbird - Email client
• Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
• Portable NVU - HTML Editor

• OpenOffice (PDF) - Office Suite
• Miranda IM - Instant messaging
• FileZilla - FTP

• Portable Firefox - Web browser
• Portable Thunderbird - Email client
• Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
• Portable NVU - HTML Editor

• OpenOffice (PDF) - Office Suite
• Miranda IM - Instant messaging
• FileZilla - FTP

• Portable Firefox - Web browser
• Portable Thunderbird - Email client
• Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
• Portable NVU - HTML Editor

• OpenOffice (PDF) - Office Suite
• Miranda IM - Instant messaging
• FileZilla - FTP

Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).

In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU and Portable Sunbird. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.

The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.

I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.

Future plans include:
- Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth
- Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use.
- Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default)
- Single, combined launcher for all products
- Full theme support
- Lots more?

Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).

In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU and Portable Sunbird. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.

The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.

I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.

Future plans include:
- Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth
- Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use.
- Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default)
- Single, combined launcher for all products
- Full theme support
- Lots more?

I just saw this today... a version of Firefox optimised for a USB key.

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

If you want to be able to use Firefox wherever you go, without having to install it on every machine, check out Portable Firefox here (linked from mozdev.org. It is a version of Firefox 1.0 that you install on a USB key drive (or flash card, CD, ZIP disk, etc) to take with you. You could probably also set up Windows' autorun feature so when you plug the drive in, Firefox starts automatically.

Info and download here.