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."

Comments

Been using this for a while

[lordkuri]

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.

Re:Been using this for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also damn handy when your old school IT manager refuses to allow installation of any other browser besides IE.

Re:Been using this for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell he's old school because he forgot to disable USB Storage support when he locked your shit down.

Re:Been using this for a while

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

Lateness

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey slashdot, two weeks ago called. They'd like their news back.

Hot damn

[wcitechnologies]

This is awesome on a number of levels.

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.

Paradigm

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

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.

Re:Why don't you just use Internet Explorer?

[f4llenang3l]

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).

All you need to do is use Mozilla

[justinarthur]

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.

Re:Nice, but...

[squallbsr]

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...