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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.
Hey slashdot, two weeks ago called. They'd like their news back.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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).
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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 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.
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.
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
Realistically no more than 64MB, but you mightaswell just go for a 256MB one as it's only a few dollars more for a lot more space.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
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.
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
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
Probably not many, but those that do would be the same ones who would be confused by the error page in the listings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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):
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!
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