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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 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.
Why did I have to read half the page to figure out what version of FireFox/ThunderBird he had packaged though ?? (of course it's windows, I wonder why I even wondered, duh)
OTOH I suppose it's easier to find a random Windows PC than a real computer nowadays... (gratuitious flaimbait, I know)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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."
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.
Probably not many, but those that do would be the same ones who would be confused by the error page in the listings.
or even better don't try to make an end run around IT at work, eventually it will show up in some sort of log or management console, or someone from IT will walk by with you running firefox. Then you can tell HR how clever you are as they kick your ass to the curb, if IT are assclowns and force everyone to use IE and that causes a virus or spyware problem then IT looks bad, if you run firefox off your thumb drive then you look like a security risk or a "rebel" and you are likely to get canned. Personally I love Firefox and hate iexplode, but not enough to risk getting fired over. (unless of course your job really blows and you want to get fired)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
mod parent up. I work for military and the only approved browser is exploder. I would say a good portion of my group uses firefox at home and we all have admin access to our machines due to our roles so installing is no problem and in our cases we are not being audited for software (yet). However we can get a security sweep done of our office at a moments notice and that would be pretty much job termination, none of us are stupid enough to risk our jobs for it.
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!