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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."
and then get a shit load of spyware, viruses, etc. at the same time? No thanks.
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).
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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!
Not really weird. It appears that Firefox, when it doesn't recognize what you typed in the address bar as an actual address, tries to use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" system to get to the actual page. For instance, type "quicktime" in the address bar, and you'll get sent to apple.com/quicktime, since that's the first result on a Google search for "quicktime". The problem therefore lies in Firefox not recognizing the extra "http://" as extraneous, and instead acting like it's a search term. It just so happens that the first result for a search on "http://" with Google is Microsoft's home page.
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If you want this same concept on a larger scale, look at Flash Linux - Linux with GNOME 2.8 on a 256 USB key.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
there is an extension for firefox (not sure how it would work on the removable version) to ftp your bookmarks down on launch and up on exit... works pretty good - called bookmarks synchronizer
But in windows you can disable this "feature" by disabling write caching in the preferences. That way it will always write everything when you tell it to. That way you dont need to "eject" the media.
In WinDoze XP SP2 you can access the device properties from the device manager, under "Disk Drives" - Find your device and right click to choose "Properties", then you can click on the "Policies" tab and tell it to optimize for fast removal...
I know its in a different place for Windoze 2k, but you will have to find it. You need to disable "Write Caching" then Presto! it will work like previously...
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
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.
That is awfully wrong. async does the opposite; it performs i/o asynchronously, not taking care to leave the metadata in a consistent state. Fast (esp. vs. synchronous on harddisks) but dangerous (esp.. etc). If it helps at all in this setting, you'd want sync.
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...
Unsion can be found at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
From the Web page: "Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other."
Seems like the parent post was correct -- this may come in handy on my newly-aquired USB drive.
most have a read only switch somewhere on the device.
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."
On my Belkin 128 MB usb dongle, I have a little jumper-slider (like seen on matrox video cards). This is a chip-based write-protect. Takes a paperclip to do, but your data isnt changeable in the least.
Ultimate Boot CD for Windows saved my ass a few days ago, perhaps that project might be of interest to you as well.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
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.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
What if (as in every case I've seen on win2k, but it probably depends upon the device or controller or something), the write caching option is greyed out, yet write caching is evidently enabled as it still blows rasberries when you yank it out without first having told it to eject it?
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
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
I made a slight mistake in my previous message. Typing simply "quicktime" will send you to apple.com/quicktime/download/, whereas Quicktime.com goes to simply apple.com/quicktime/ (no "download" subdirectory). I thought the same thing as you at first, but it still works differently. I just tried "litigious bastards" in the address bar, and it did in fact forward me to sco.com (I'm using Firefox 1.0 final). HTTP.com brings me to an ad site, not Microsoft like "http://" does.
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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
I recommend changing the "I'm feeling lucky" search behavior to a normal Google search
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q =");
Insert into user.js (using ChromEdit extension):
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.
???
Most recent BIOSes can already boot from USB. If yours doesn't, then yes, you probably would have use a CD or floppy bootloader.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Whoops... nevermind. It seems that if you connect through a proxy server that intercepts the error and sends you a "no such domain" type error page, Firefox is tricked to believing the address is valid and will not perform a Google search.
Well, I've got you part of the way already:
- Portable Firefox - Web browser
- Portable Thunderbird - Email client
- Portable Sunbird - Calendar application
- Portable NVU - HTML Editor
To that, you can add:More will be forthcoming, I'm sure.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc