Slashdot Mirror

Probably not a good idea. http://portableapps.com/forums/support/firefox_portable/faq http://portableapps.com/node/10338

What happens if your employee copies a bunch of MP3's to the PC, since they like to listen to music.

Most employees can probably do that unless it's locked down so tight they don't have access to windows media. Most companies don't do that because they may have their own company programs and training videos they want the employees to view. And then, if the employee has a USB drive you'd better remove the sound card because there are certainly portable apps that can just run it from there.

It's called personal responsiblity. I don't think most people are saying let the users go wild and install any software they want. But if they're dumb enough to install something illegal (MP3s, last time I looked, are not inherently illegal) they should be held responsible. When companies are proscuted is when BSA comes in and finds MS Office on EVERYONE's computer and they can only produce a license for one. (I don't think the RIAA would even bother with this as most companies DO restrict usage of P2P applications so no sharing would be available.)

But it does remind me of an BOFH (true story) that had the computers so locked down (Win95 days) you could not access Windows Explorer (aka File Explorer then) to try and keep users from installing or using rogue programs. (In fact I seem to remember, Win95 was actually on a server and his users had to log in to it.) Thank goodness I wasn't under his section. But my section taught department computer classes to get employees up to speed which is how we heard about what he was doing. Of course it made the computers unstable as hell....

I haven't installed it yet, but FF Portable has a FF3b5 version available:

Firefox Portable

Yay!

Just take Firefox Portable and disable many of the nasty defaults like third-party cookies etc. Then load all the paranoia extensions like no-script, safecache, safehistory, refcontrol, cslite etc. and you can create a pretty secure browser without having to develop one yourself.

Do you consider 219 MB portable?

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test

I have to say, I'm posting from it right now and it is impressive how much quicker it is than FF2!

There's always Portable Firefox as well.

I'm also running FF3 beta 4, and I can say: IT IS FAST. It is probably the fastest browser I have used, ever. I don't necessarily like all the changes, and agree the new icons are a little homely, but the speed is undeniable, and those other quibbles are largely cosmetic.

For those of you on Windows who don't want to hose your registry with multiple Firefox installs, I highly recommend the portable version. In fact, for 20 different reasons I recommend the portable version of not only Firefox, but all your Windows apps:

http://portableapps.com/news/2008-03-11_-_firefox_portable_3_beta_4

It's not a real package management system, but it beats the hell out of installing and reinstalling tons of crap in Windows. I think in many ways it also beats most Linux package managers I've dealt with.

I also want to submit a complaint about a lack of x64 apps in general. There is still no Skype for 64 bit Linux, for example, and that's just plain bad form.

Keep rocking Mozilla! Keep rocking FOSS! Keep rocking portableapps.com!

rhY

You can try out 3 Beta 4 without disrupting your Firefox 2 install on Windows by using Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 4. It's designed for portable devices (USB flash drives, iPods, portable hard drives), but you can also just run it from your desktop.

Rather than trying to sync bookmarks between multiple machines, why not use portable apps http://portableapps.com/ via a memory stick and only have the one set?

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 3 was released a few hours after the announcement. It's packaged with a launcher so it runs self-contained so you can use it from a flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc. But it's also handy for trying out the current beta without affecting your local install. You can even run it from your desktop to try it out and then delete it.

It's available from the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 3 homepage.

Unless your dain-bramaged IT department won't install it on your computer despite that you need it to do your job.

Portable Apps is great for this purpose (I assume that's what you're using). Part of the problem with getting people to use open source software is the fact that it will generally replace, not complement, their existing software. In my experience people don't mind being told, "There's this great piece of software, you should try it." What they take exception to is being told to stop using software that they're quite happy with.

Portable Apps is great because it doesn't replace their existing workflow. They only need to use it when they're out and about. And they can decide at a later date if they want to alter their regular workflow.

Who cares? The above is the wrong question.

Is OOo good enough to do the work that needs doing? Often it is. And for all general classroom work, and all the administrivia associated with keeping a school running, it most assuredly is. I speak as someone who daily handles curricula and "back office support" for classes, who also has a degree in programmer/analyst studies.

Student assignments and administrative tasks are prosaic work; bling actually gets in the way. MS Office 2007 has a lot more bling than MS Office 2003, and oodles more than OOo. That bling is important to all kinds of pimps and advertising firms, but it doesn't add any value to the classroom or school office.

Considering that its long term costs are lower (mostly due to its freedom from enforced upgrade cycles and the lower overheads of maintaining ODF archives), OOo is the natural choice for schools. And also for a lot of businesses that don't need to have the latest in bling in their documents.

Of course the kicker is that for less than 15USD, we can provide each student with a USB flash drive loaded with their own customizable copy of Portable Apps OOo, and they can learn to manage their home work with 21st century workflow concepts.

That is priceless.

No first part MSIs. The majority of our workstations here are Windows XP.

As an admin of a medium-sized corporate network of XP boxes, might I ask why that matters? Personally I encourage my users to use the Portable Edition of Firefox, as it doesn't require any installer (I can preconfigure it exactly as I want, and just copy the installed dir to any machine), but even if I needed to use the old-fashioned .exe installer, why would that matter?



Management through group policy, or some other way to lock it down.

So you trust your users to behave and use a locked down IE, but you don't trust them enough to limit their browsing to sites the company would disaprove of?

Not to say I disagree - Quite the opposite, I pretty much understand completely - I simply don't count on them behaving in the first place. But I find it a whole lot more effective to restrict users at the proxy (and block all non-proxied traffic).



Better support for restricted users and roaming profiles

FireFox Portable very neatly solves that problem. Install the whole thing to their My Documents, it stores the entire profile under the installed dir, and you have no problems with permissions.

And here's the link to do it: PortableApps.com. I've put about 100 512MB and 1.0GB flashdrives into the hands of not-so-savvy persons, loaded with OOo, Firefox (with a specific set of bookmarks and extensions), and a couple of other goodies. These have gone to job seekers who have been through our "Work Place Basics" and similar courses. Haven't gotten any meaningful amount of feedback yet, but that suggests that at least the program hasn't flopped right out of the starting gate.

Figure that loading a USB drive with OOo and Firefox will eat up about 300 MB. If you add a portable XAMPP, as I did so I can work on some web development, that would be another 300 MB. Worth it though, at least on my 80GB WD Passport.

That's why there's such thing as "Portable Apps".

If you are non-technical, you can install Portable Thunderbird on a USB key and any Windows computer modern enough to have USB port (and with enough relaxed security to allow you to run executables from a mounted device) will let you read your encrypted email (Thunderbird supports GnuPG, I think) without having to install anything. If you want to do the encryption/decryption manually, there's probably something like "Portable GnuWin32" of which GnuPG would be a part (I found some discussion here).

P.S. Oh, and yes, government installing hardware keylogger is a real problem. Which is why I always carry a USB keyboard with me. Or better yet, my own personal laptop (and all internet connections are done through a SSH tunnel to a server in secure location).

That's why there's such thing as "Portable Apps".

If you are non-technical, you can install Portable Thunderbird on a USB key and any Windows computer modern enough to have USB port (and with enough relaxed security to allow you to run executables from a mounted device) will let you read your encrypted email (Thunderbird supports GnuPG, I think) without having to install anything. If you want to do the encryption/decryption manually, there's probably something like "Portable GnuWin32" of which GnuPG would be a part (I found some discussion here).

P.S. Oh, and yes, government installing hardware keylogger is a real problem. Which is why I always carry a USB keyboard with me. Or better yet, my own personal laptop (and all internet connections are done through a SSH tunnel to a server in secure location).

Portable Thunderbird plus enigmail. http://portableapps.com/support/thunderbird_portable#encryption

You might want to look at Slax and PortableApps. Those are my solutions for when I have to use the locked-down computers at the university. Tip for booting Slax when the BIOS is set to run from the harddrive first and is password protected: just unplug the machine and pop the BIOS battery out. (you did not hear that from me).

Wikipedia seems to be having some issues with admins deleting articles in connection to their notability guidelines lately. PortableApps.com, the website that makes available portable software that runs from removable media (like a portable version of Firefox) was recently deleted under the notability guidelines with very little notice (aka speedy deletion). This despite the fact that it's the most popular portable platform (more popular than the commercial ones), in the top 10 on SourceForge, in the top 5,000 websites in the world and has been extensively covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, PC Magazine, PC World, Wired, etc.

Wikipedia seems to be having some issues with admins deleting articles in connection to their notability guidelines lately. PortableApps.com, the website that makes available portable software that runs from removable media (like a portable version of Firefox) was recently deleted under the notability guidelines with very little notice (aka speedy deletion). This despite the fact that it's the most popular portable platform (more popular than the commercial ones), in the top 10 on SourceForge, in the top 5,000 websites in the world and has been extensively covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, PC Magazine, PC World, Wired, etc.

U3 is crap. PortableApps came first and is better.

I've had a number of people using both PowerPoint and OpenOffice.org Impress presentations that bring OpenOffice.org Portable with them as a backup. One found OpenOffice.org wasn't installed and was fine. Another found that their PowerPoint presentation, for some reason, wouldn't open on the copy of PowerPoint on the desktop hooked up to the A/V system. Luckily, OpenOffice.org Portable could open it just fine.

If by "the computers I go to" you mean that you shuttle between several different PCs and can't guarantee what's installed on them, just throw OpenOffice Portable onto a USB memory stick and carry it with you. Then you know you have an ODF reader at hand at all times.

Lesson 3? Don't worry about Microsoft being incompatible with its self (its own .doc format), and bring a free portable ap (OpenOffice)? http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable

Here's the problem: None of the computers I go to have support for ODF.

Here's the problem: None of the computers I go to have support for ODF.

Ever thought of a USb Key and Portable Firefox ?

You don't need to install or compile it. Just plug in your flash drive with GIMP Portable on it. :-)

Instead of Noscript and FlashBlock, I use Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition and install the IE View Lite extension (among others, like AdBlock Plus). By default, there's no Flash plugin in this version of Firefox, so everything is just fine and dandy. When I need to view a page that has Flash (for me, specifically, that's a handful of sites, like YouTube), I just use IE View Lite to open that single page or link in Internet Explorer.

You can either copy the settings as others have suggested, or go for OpenOffice Portable. Basically you can install the entire program, and all settings on a USB stick or other portable drive, or non-portable (but that defeats the purpose), and run it right off the drive with no installation or transferring of settings necessary.

A great place to look for bloatless software are Portable Apps. Most of them are compact yet still work great for there intended purpose.

http://www.portableapps.com/

I've been liking portable apps a lot. its versions of Open Office, Pidgin(gaim), Thunderbird, Firefox, pretty much any app and it all runs on a flash drive. http://portableapps.com/

The flaw with putty is that it stores your server list in the registry; not a text file in the home directory. Portable apps has a version of putty that stores it as a text file.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portab le

Regards

Another good listing of smallish software is Portable Apps. These are normal (open source) applications that have been fine-tuned to be "portable" so that you can run them off of a USB key for instance (e.g. they store settings locally).

Many of the apps were chosen because they are small and light. Others have been stripped to the minimum, so that they can fit comfortably on removable media (e.g. OpenOffice Portable is 69 MB instead of the usual 100 MB).

The PortableApps Suite is only 89MB and covers all the basics (office suite, browser, email, etc.).

If you're looking for a lightweight app to fill a particular need, it's a good place to start looking.

This might help a bit, depending on whether you feel like risking running non-management-approved apps at work (let your own commonsense decide):

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_port able

Works quite nicely, and needs about 25 mb or so on a USB stick (or the HD)...

That's what it's designed to do.

http://portableapps.com/

We have a tracking proxy here too. I set up an old P3-550 in my basement. It's running a proxy, and zebedee.

At work, I run the other side of zebedee with a key on a usb drive. Point your browser to localhost:8080 and you're ready to rock! To the admins, they just see a stream of traffic to some webpage at notmy.real.address.com:443.

Another great slack tool is VMware. Make virtual disks with fun stuff on them and take them to work. Or bring in books in pdf format on your usb drive. Music and movies, if you're daring enough. Use VLC Portable for that. Leaves no trace on your PC.

Another good tool is AutoHotKey. Perfect for making custom panic/boss keys.

I guess the whole point of this is that employees, if motivated enough, will be able to slack off at work. No matter what.

You mean this? http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_por table

Only a sucker would give in to the man, and not replace IE with Firefox on his company laptop.

USB thumb drives are pretty cheap and getting cheaper. Wally World sells 32Meg sticks next to the M&M's

My suggestion is to simply acquire one of these wonderfully useful devices (if you don't already have one) and visit portableapps.com. There is a plethora of applications that you can install on your stick (including Firefox) and use on any machine into which you can plug it (including your company laptop).

The plugin gripe is point 7 of the 12-point plan:

7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box

Isn't the purpose of giving users non-admin accounts on computers, though, to prevent them from doing things such as installing unauthorized applications? Anyway, if you want to run Firefox on a machine without authorization, just use Portable Firefox. If you want to install applications on your own computer, I would expect you would login as an admin.

Would running a user-permissions binary from a flashdrive count? It doesn't put anything on the hard disk (I believe it works even if there is no writeable hard disk). Firefox Portable uses its own directory (on the flashdrive, if you run it from there) to store its user configuration and such. It can store themes, bookmarks, and extensions there, and many plugins (Flash, etc.) as well.

Portable Firefox + USB thumb drive.

what about portable apps, if you have access to a cdrom or usb key it could come in handy i think
here it is http://portableapps.com/apps

Uh, no. It just means more http tunneled over ssh on weekdays. Firefox usage is based on whether or not usb storage is locked down.

Just as a tip - try PortableFirefox (http://portableapps.com/), it should bypass the "remove firefox" script.