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Portable Firefox and Thunderbird
RHLJay writes "-For the Road Warrior on the Go-
If you have a laptop, desktop, and/or work PC keeping the information from Firefox and Thunderbird
sync'd with each other is hard, not to mention the extensions. Not anymore - John Haller has packaged both Firefox and Thunderbird into 'Flash drive friendly' executables which can be run directly from a USB flash drive. Visit his site for more info. Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird."
This will be nice. Sort of like what you can do with Knoppix Linux or such.
This is damn handy when you're trying to patch/clean a spyware riddled machine. Sometimes it's almost impossible to get stuff working with so much crap clogging up the browser. This thing is uber useful, IMHO.
Hey slashdot, two weeks ago called. They'd like their news back.
lol yeah.
This has been around for quite some time....
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
for the NYT firefox ad... Anyone know when its coming out??
As a computer technician, there have been several times where I have been prevented from getting a vital file off the internet when trying to repair somebody's computer. Usually this is because IE has become a spyware infested rathole.
If I had the ability to carry a browser with me, use it, download files, etc. without even having to install anything, hot damn, that'd save some time.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
I've used these in the past on a 32MB USB 1.0 flash drive, loaded slowly due to the slow USB speed but worked great other then that :)
Must get the updated one's now,
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
I've used this since before they had extension support. I don't recall ever seeing a portable Opera...
Plus with all the modifications they did for Firefox, such as Download History Cleared, Browser History Disabled, Form Info Saving Disabled, No Disk Cache, and No permanent cookies... it won't take up a very large footprint. Mind you, Firefox installed only takes up a meager 8.6Mb.
Thunderbird on the other hand compresses EXEs and DLLs with UPX. They also recompressed the JAR files (which are ZIP files).
and then get a shit load of spyware, viruses, etc. at the same time? No thanks.
Now I can use firefox at work where the I.S. Nazi's only allow I.E. morons.. I was actually just talking about this with a co worker to see if I could do it... looks like it was done for me!
Why do I have this bad habit? Because I first started using flash drives on Win98SE, and those manufacturer's drivers always flushed the data to the drive when available. I could unplug them the moment the drive actvity led stopped flashing. When I "eject" the flash drive from 2K, I can see Windows do a final file access to it before telling me it's safe to disconnect. Leaves me really wondering what happens to data in the drive when I get a power failure or BSoD before an eject.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
submit it again. maybe they'll do a dupe on it.
I would like to see this done for many different apps (browser, email, IM, blah blah), basically anything that requires user preferences... package a small binary and the preferences together such that they can run off the USB drive. With more and more people owning/working with multiple machines, this would be really useful.
*yawn*
Honestly, have you actually tried Firefox? It loads quickly, and it doesn't require any configuring, at least on my machine, aside from standard installation-type stuff, it didn't. Unlike IE, though, it has several bonuses: You can configure it to do all kinds of cool and useful things if you're a Morlock instead of an Eloi (thank you Neal Stephenson), using any of a variety of useful tools; it comes with tabbed browsing; and it's pretty much adware-spyware-popup proof, unlike IE, every version of which (until XP SP 2) came with a handy "Always Trust Content from the Gator Corporation" checkbox. Bottom line is, Firefox is a much more flexible, streamlined browser, to suit a variety of needs, including those of the eloi who don't want to mess with all the messy details behind the pretty pictures on the screen. Comparatively, IE doesn't allow nearly as much useful flexibility, although you can get the Google toolbar if you are hard up (though that basically comes integrated in Firefox).
---
she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
In the MozillaZine Forum, many discussed putting the win32 and linux binaries on a single stick & having them share profiles. Might as well throw in the Mac binaries too & then you'd have something really useful!
I use firefox at home and at school and I'd like to sync my bookmarks and stuff. I dont feel like setting up ldap, is there an easy way to do this using rsync over ssh or something similar.
-- john
Michael's stories really are a Herculean effort. Specifically, the fifth one.
At the bottom of the
A nice touch for this would be to have the USB drives autorun launch a scrip that would identify if its plugged into its "home" computer and would then sync up its boormarks with the computer.
I use a IMAP mail server which I can access from the outside, and the bookmarks file I keep synchronised though mailing it to myself. I have been meaning to make some java to catalog my bookmarks and keep it sync'd but I never got around to it.
Why UNIX?
If you need to use both a web browser and an email client on a regular basis in multiple locations, then you don't need these customized builds, there is already something around for you, it's called Mozilla. Maybe some of you recent Firefox-from-IE converts have never used Mozilla or think it reminds you of Netscape (Firefox reminds me of IE). Give it a chance though. It allows you to use roaming profiles which is exactly what this article is about. You also aren't wasting your system resources like you are when you run Thunderbird and Firefox at the same time. You generally save over 30MB of RAM by just running the Mozilla Application Suite. This is because you only have one instance of the Gecko engine running instead of two. Oh, and you can plop Mozilla right onto a flash drive from the zip file builds available from the Mozilla.org Foundation.
huh?
This guy ripped this idea off first.
Laugh, this is funny, not overrated
And I'll have fun fun fun
'til my admin takes my T-bird away
(fun fun fun 'til my admin takes my T-bird away)
with apologies to The Beach Boys.
With this, he really can steal your Thunder...bird.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But then you can spend hours cleaning instead, and that's so much more fun! Plus, it's so exciting to search for many more hours making sure it's ALL *permanantly* gone, what with all of Windows' nooks and crannies! Just thinking about it makes me so excited!
What a lucky man, I wish I had all that. I would be busy for days!
This sounds really handy. What size flash drive is necessary for both firebox and thunderbird?
In light of this new portible Firefox release, I'd like to point out that Portable IE blew goats. It crashed ALL THE TIME, and lacked functional from IE (which lacks functionality anyway!).
I haven't had a chance to use portable firefox yet, but somehow I know I won't be disapointed.
The funny thing is that Portable IE was released by microsoft themselves
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
I've been using this over a networked drive in the computer labs for quite a while now and it works great. It takes a while to start over the nework, but it is nice to have my bookmarks and cookies with me whichever windows computer i"m on. And it provides a nice bit of security since the browser is on my person network space and there isn't any way the next stranger who hops on the computer could stumble on my history or anything. (sure if someone really wanted to they could, but since everyone else uses the browser installed on the computer I don't thinks that's likely)
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Whatever you use make sure to drop unison on your USB key. That way you can sync bidirectionally all kinds of stuff. Try it with home directory, emacs, eclipse etc.
It's double plus good.
evil is as evil does
I don't see the news. I already have firefox working on a USB device. It's great. Firefox does not require any registry entries by default. That being said, you can already install extensions, bookmars, etc. and such on you USB device with firefox on it.
Old news, but I suppose lots of people don't know that you can do this already.
There's no place like ~/
Firefox project works. Thunderbird project works. But Mozilla Marketing Project it's working beyond expectatives, and not only at Slashdot: Video of ABC News on Firefox
My city: Barcelona.
Don't forget that a few other people have created portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, including myself. To check out my development, go here.
the thunderbird version sounds kind of like poco mail - they have been seeling a flash keychain version of their email software for a while now http://www.pocosystems.com/home/ - they call it email voyager. works slick.
Props to H.G. Wells, too, of course.
If you're running low on space by the time you hit thunderbird, you could also try jbmail which similarly is a secure mail client that can be run straight off removable media (but is very small, 1 mb). but it doesn't share data with firefox. Hell, it doesn't do HTML either (displays as text) which may be a shortcoming or a feature depending on how paranoid you are...
Awesome. My girlfriend is getting me a Flash drive for Christmas, and I expect this will be the first thing on it :)
I've been using firefox portable at schol on my flash drive for about 2 weeks
I'm having a problem at work. My desktop machine was just refreshed (lease ended on old machine, so I was issued a new machine). It looks like the IT department has disabled USB devices under W2K (I'm guessing they're worried I might be too productive). If I plug in a jump drive, or a palm pilot, W2K doesn't sense it. But, if I reboot with the USB device plugged in, the BIOS will see it (and, if I remember correctly, W2K will see it after the reboot). Does anyone have an idea what I can do to enable the USB devices under W2K?
i'm logging as coward cause I don't feel like lookin g up my access codes right now.
ilmmo.com, my blog, covers this a fair bit.
Portable Firefox, after you load flash, is the shiznit.
your ie gets bookmarks magically between computers when you move? nice for you then troller.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm something of a big fan of Bart's Portable Evironment Windows boot disc. Native R/W ntfs support, supports McAfee command line virus scanner (with a custom gui), adaware, networking support and many other useful plugins. All in all, a great recovery tool. I wonder if this here portable firefox would work with the Bart boot disc. It would make a nice addition to an alreay powerful tool.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Of course, I assumed that was implied. I just didn't want to neglect Stephenson's clever application to modern technology.
---
she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
Thank you MOZILLA.org I need this so badly, I sync my PC and my Laptop everyday and I had to resort all of sort messy and not one clean step or such simple process like they offer now. I tried it. It works very nicely. Although they're better than M$ and that's the key eh?!
May
At first I was very excited to see this, the world portable struck notions of 'lightweight' and 'slimmed' down... unforchunately not.
.. everything runs great, with the exception of Firefox...
I'm currently sitting here on my Sony PCG-C1X a Pentium 233 with 64 Megs of ram
What ever happened to Firefox being a lightweight web browser? at 30 + Megs it's rather bloated... imho
Yup it's great and I love using it on my desktop, but what happen to being slim and tiny?
Dillo, not so much (-;
Mike
Gamblers Forum
I'm handing out USB flash drives this season with software pre-installed on them. Portable Firefox will be the prime app on the drive.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I would be more interested in knowing how to use the same email directory and profile settings with both my Linux version of Thunderbird and my Windows version of Thunderbird. Has anyone ever tried this?
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
And they do allow you to download all your bookmarks in a format suitable for import to the major browsers.
Backflip - highly recommended. (Not affiliated with them.)
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I'm not sure what the big bonus is to use a browser for that, when you can just put the spyware/virus cleaning programs on the key, and then install them. No waiting around for a gummed up dialer or anything.
what would be really usefull is being able to run Firefox from an online location, so you don't even have to take a flash drive with you - as long as your connected to the internet you have access to your firefox.
I've been using Protable Firefox for the past few weeks. This with the addition of the Bookmark Synchronizer Extension, this makes sure I always have my favorite browser and all of my bookmarks with me at all times.
Filezilla is a freeware ftp prog that is seld-directory-contained. Very handy for accessing your files at work when you can't remember your webspace password.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
WTF?
What kind of obscure extensions are these?
Subject says it all.
Is there any way to synch firefox/thunderbird settings over a network? I don't want to just keep bookmark files synched, but also toolbar settings, RSS settings, history, etc. Somebody mentioned using rsync, is that likely to work?
I like to make constant adjustments to my environment, and I keep all my linux config files (along with everything else) under verson control using SVN and then simply 'update' each machine as I move around. However, this doesn't work very well with the mozilla config directories because things change around in there too much each time I start an app. Also, upgrading versions every 2-3 months means I need to reconfigure my app each time. Has anybody kicked this problem yet?
take a look at http://breasy.com. Just what the doctor ordered...
Have you ever asked yourself, Is It Normal?.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access. In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it.
Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go.
You can check out my cheesy web site for it.
I plan to set up a separate Internet2 mirror for college students soon. I'll announce this on the mailing list within a week or two.
|/usr/games/fortune
Santa should be bringing me a USB drive, and while I don't need to sync anything, I'm looking forward to being able to demo Firefox quickly and easily. Once they see it running, it sells itself.
Laptop - Linux (Primary Work)
Laptop - Win (Primary Play)
Desktop - Win (home)
Admittedly, I have to keep my extensions in sync, but to keep data, here's what I do:
For Thunderbird
For Firefox:
So with these little tricks, I'm able to keep all three environments pretty much in sync. I know, this isn't for everyone -- I don't expect everyone to have 200+MB of IMAP space, or do I expect them to know how to write procmail rules, but it works for me.
S
I prefer having a portable linux distro that works on windows and linux. See PVPM
Then again, if you are a tech who needs to download files directly to the comptuer you are servicing, PortableFireFox is probably the better bet.
Just move your Windows Thunderbird e-mail archive from the default location under your profile to a FAT32 partition root and point Window's side Thunderbird at it in the prefs. On the Linux side symlink your Mail folder to the equivalent folder under FAT32. Everything in Thunderbird will be happy, with the exception of the filters. Filters are defined with absolute paths and thus have different paths on Windows and Linux.
I wish I would have heard about this one sooner. I have been stuck in IE land on the PC's at my college due to the "Clean Slate" software that has ben installed on our computers on campus. However since we have a number of people running C compilers off of USB drives they havent disabled the USB ports yet. Looks like campus browsing just got a lot more pleasant.
Requiem
If you *can* make an app this way, why not? It seems to make so much sense.
Are developers just reflexively following some "How to make a Windows application: DLLs in %WINDIR%, SYSTEM32, and the Program Files Directory, 2000 Registry Entries, and a unique directory for settings"?
Is there some valid architectural reason for it? Or is it some kind of twisted copy-protection-through-complexity?
Does this Portable Firefox run off of read-only media (i.e. can you run it right off a CD-ROM, not CD-RW)?
(Some people mentioned read-only USB memory above, but I didn't get whether or not it actually worked).
Also, is there a Linux or OSX build somewhere that runs from read-only media?
Thanks in advance.
Anton Markov
*** Linux - May the source be with you! ***
This is really handy for those cases where you want to take your customized browser with you. Using the bookmarks off my thumb-drive I never have to worry anymore. Not to mention I can take this to the library or wherever I want and I can use firefox there isntead. An excellent idea.
I could see this being very well accepted, It will help spread firefox more, It can also be used as a demonstration tool as well
Brett Meadors
Firefox goes insanely slow when run under a USB 1.1 drive. You mind as well copy all of it to the desktop and run it there and copy the files back to the USB drive when you are done.
I downloaded this a few days ago, wated to use Firefox at school becasue they only have IE there (and I prefer firefox) but the security of internet use on the network is high and it wouldnt let me use it at all. Kinda unfortunate, the portable file didnt open so I had to try the normal file which worked, but wouldnt connect to the net at all.
On a related note, I have to say that I like programs like this, ones that can be installed onto a USB pen, it means I can sue them on pretty much any computer without installing a program over and over again.
Fair enough.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it gets difficult maintaining four+ computers between home and work. I know many would say use cvs or some other revision control but it would be interesting to have a plugin and whatever so firefox would pull the stuff automatically.
"For the Road Warrior on the Go- If you have a laptop, desktop, and/or work PC keeping the information from Firefox and Thunderbird sync'd with each other is hard, not to mention the extensions."
What about this is difficult? Why install a different version of a browser on a laptop? The last time I checked mine, I found it has its own hard drive, plenty of RAM, and works just about the same as a desktop system.
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
I forgot to say: rsync is a distributed binary diff. You can sync everything with that...
Not everyone wants to have sex with tabbed browsing.
Why not use Bookmarks Synchronizer or SyncMarks?
Firefox is next version opensource NS7.2 which few of you liked and you laughed at for having only 5 - 10% of the market. But Firefox is new messiah so logically it will conquer the world. I'm waiting for the mothership to take us all to the promised land.
Hi, I use it every once in a while.
.ini file you can really put it everywhere.
It liberated me from taking my laptop with me when I visit geek friends (there is always a free laptop I can use).
Also, if I am in an emergency and need to read email etc. I use my usb drive that I always carry. Webmail and simply using somebody's else computer are not an option with me as I need to use ssh to forward ports, both for my private email (that I host at home) and my work email/intranet.
Having said that, it is a little bit slow, although it may be because it is reading from a flash drive, but I can wait.
They should be documented a little bit better. For instance, they tell you that you can only install it in the main directory of the drive, but if you simply change the
I have not figured out how to handle multiple profiles though.
All in all, I am very happy with it.THANKS!
before disagreeing reply's kick in plz
Hivemind harvest in progress..
it's only a quarter, and look how much more you get!
Firefox seems stable, lightweight, and full featured (for Web browsing). It's also the center of the browser development zeitgeist, and now I can use it on both my computer and my phone. So why am I sticking with Mozilla? Why shouldn't I switch to FireFox? Corollary question: why has the Mozilla team created their own toughest competition?
--
make install -not war
I need to start carrying around games like that. That way I can play on my work machine w/o breaking the rules and installing software :-)
First of all, http://http.com isn't a redirect page, so you're wrong there. Second of all, the rest of your post doesn't make any sense.
On a fresh new installation you only have to enter the URL (preferably https), and the username/password to get it...
There is even an Apache mod complete with FreeBSD ports thereof.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So how do I get BIOS to recognize my USB key as a boot device? Would this BIOS update get my computer to recognize it? Or do I need to put in a CD with a bootloader?
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?
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Am I missing something, or can't I just symlink my .mozilla dir onto some flash drive, like this:
/mnt/usbdrive /mnt/usbdrive/dot-mozilla /mnt/usbdrive/dot-mozilla ~/.mozilla
bash> mount
bash> mv ~/.mozilla
bash> ln -s
Then, tote the USB drive around, mount it and you're reading to go.
???
Is there anywhere where I can nominate this as the coolest project of the year?
multi-user machines with different preferences for each application. \documents and settings\$username\local settings\application data\$company\$product
Its annoying, but it makes sense. If all apps were written with their settings in their own folders we would be taking a step backwards and admins would go crazy trying to support multiple users. profiles should be left up to the OS, nix or win, but it would be nice to have some sort utility to make it easier to run programs on USB drives like this.
I'm sure we can have our cake and eat it too, its just a matter of figuring out how to code it all up. damnit now im hungry.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I know how rsync works and I can find the url (thanks anyway). the question is whether it works to syncronize mozilla settings: all machines are changing the files, so if I fail to run rsync before running an app on a machine just one time, I now have conflicts. How are those resolved?
Is there some valid architectural reason for it?
Shared libraries and keeping configuration etc. between different versions of the same program.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
It doesn't seem to work for me in Firefox 1.0 for OSX- entering either "http://" or "Quicktime", for example, just results in an error 404.
Since IE is on every windows computer, and IE does not work on anything else
IE for Mac.
the thing you were carrying is either the binary
Or a self-contained package with a different version of IE. I know that IE's rendering behavior changed from 3.0 to 4.0 to 5.0 to 5.5 to 6.0, and if there's no way, then testing a web page layout on multiple IE versions requires purchasing and maintaining PCs to run separate versions of Windows. (Or are IE 6 and Mozilla enough nowadays?)
If he works for a company that uses an MS Domain and Roaming Profiles they would follow him. He sure looks like a troll, but if all he is doing is switching which desk he is sitting at (Hotelling?) inside the company it could easily be working for him. :-)
Have you ever used rsync? It doesn't sound like it. rsync is only used for one-way sync.
To do what you describe, you need something like unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), reconcile or intellisync. I use unison for my bookmarks, and it works most of the time.
PS: I wish the idiot moderators would stop moderating posts when they don't know anything about the topic.
Any flash drive is only good for so many write actions - so I am just assuming that once you put this on the flash drive it doesn't write anything else to it while you are running FireFox from it?
What about the cache (disabled maybe?) and what about mail in Thunderbird - that would have to be written out?
I stupidly assumed that those things just lasted until you broke it form physical wear and tear and was editing too many files while still on the device and eventually sent the device to wherever dead flash usb drives go (the trash I guess).
My solution is to pull the data off that I need, put it in a temp dir, work on it there off the temp dir on the computer, and then when done dump it back down onto the flash drive. This reduces the writes to the drive.
From the sounds of it, this is not the action that the article is talking about, so I would be suspicious of increasing the likelihood of killing my usb drive.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Must be a slow news day. I've been using the standard builds of both Firefox and Thunderbird on a portable USB drive since 0.1. All the Portable Firefox project does is to optimise builds for this (e.g.: low disk usage). Anyway, the portable Firefox project has been around since June and has been mentioned on /. before.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
It has been 3.1 years since I made the switch to full time linux, and about 2.3 since I have killed my win32 dual boot partition.
I've considered switching, but my flatbed scanner is vital to the work I do on my home computer, and SANE lists it as unsupported.
What confuses me is the number of masochists among the windows crowd. Those are the people who know about opera and ff/gecko, and continue to use IE.
You try getting popular ActiveX powered web sites such as TrendMicro.com's HouseCall virus checker or CartoonNetwork.com's Codename: Kids Next Door game to work from within Opera or Firefox.
(and windows update, speaking of which -- can't that be run inside a activex testbox (one that comes with VS) anyway?)
Most of the people you call "masochists" can't afford a one-seat license for Microsoft Visual Studio.
I seem to recall my flash drive saying it was rated for some number of write/erase cycles, on the order of 100,000 or a million. Clearly this will not be a problem for any normal use, but what about running a browser off of it? Is all that data in the cache being written to the USB drive? Isn't that going to "wear out" my flash drive? Has this been addressed, or am I just wrong about this problem?
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
Pros:
Cons:
- Having to remember the USB stick
:-) - Slow startup
- Bookmark insertion, moving, deleting, etc. lag at some points (1-2 seconds on my disk)
- Waiting time after shutting down the applications before you can unplug the drive safely
- "Manual" installation of plug-ins and extensions
Of course, the pros are an absolute heavenly gift for many, so I believe most people can live with the minor cons.A few tips:
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.
"I just karma whore to everyone." -garcia (6573)
I used it to prove the greatness of 1.0, impressing our admins sufficently to get it installed in the next mass-reimage of Whitman College. They have decided not to make it default (because of "IE only pages"), but nonetheless a victory that would have been harder were it not for John.
On the same stick, I put the installer (Win and OS X (iBooks are popular on campus)), some plugins (Flash, ShockWave, etc), JRE 5.0, and a few choice XPIs (googlebar, adBlock) for which people are most likely to ask. I have found that friends somehow trust Firefox more when it comes out of my wallet than when it comes off the web. It also gives me an excuse to install it for them, and not leave anything to be mucked up during the installation process.
I already share bookmarks, passwords, page styles etc between my Opera for Windows and Opera for Linux. /mnt/windows_c/install/opera/profile/opera6.adr ~/.opera/opera6.adr
ln -s
I think something similar can bee done with Firefox too.
What about the address book? I'd love to have the address book synching across installs...
My Journal
But you already have the search box in the corner for that. Why duplicate it?
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I was talking about this idea to a coworker the other day. It seems to me that this is a no brainer - Firefox, et. al. would store things like bookmarks, cookies, and settings on a central server. The browser would read/write to this via a simple web service-style application.
This way, all you have to do is provide firefox with a URL and it works the same on any computer that you use. I'm surprized that this doesn't exist yet in some form, although the Bookmarks Sync. extension is a step in that direction.
http://www.offbyone.com/
Got it UPXed into just 750kB. Fully HTML3.2-compatible, jpg/gif/png-support. You won't need more to download some files or seek some infos....