I've also released a test version of Portable Firefox based on the new release for anyone that would like it portable... or anyone that wants to try it out without messing with their local profile or Profile Manager.
For the unfamiliar, Portable Firefox allows you to carry your whole web browser along with all your bookmarks and extensions with you on an iPod, USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it right into any Windows computer and use it just like you would on your own. It is a repackaged version of the popular Mozilla Firefox browser designed with portability in mind, so it has all the same great features of Firefox, but there's nothing to install.
I use Thunderbid for 8 different IMAP accounts, that I can easily check and switch between. Not to mention moving messages between them or to my local mail store. All in a secure client that remembers my passwords to all of them. And created Portable Thunderbird so I can do it from the road, too. Without needing to lug my laptop. And without needing to resort to a crappy webmail interface that is a not-so-close approximation of the features and functionality of a local mail client.
Working fine for me (I'm the developer). Be sure you've copied NPSWF32.dll from your local plugins directory to the Portable Firefox\plugins directory. Also, keep in mind, that it probably won't work on a PC with no Flash installed.
Don't forget that OpenOffice.org has another advantage over Microsoft office... it's portable. Due to it's open source nature, I was able to create a portable version of it (without having to worry about licensing fees, etc). It runs from any removable drive (USB thumbdrive, CDRW, iPod, etc) and is fully functional (though the Java-based stuff won't work if Java isn't installed on the host PC).
I think there is a downside to it being free. I'd like to see a simple system where I get 30 minutes free with a drink. Not sure how that would work, but it would keep the free loaders out.
I agree with the downside, especially in some locations. My local coffee/tea shop gives you 30 minutes of time with each drink you order. It's only $2 an hour after that. And they even have about a half dozen repurposed laptops with Ubuntu loaded on them available.
There are a few people that work from there for an hour or two (or more) during the day. They just had a going-away party for a regular who was leaving the country.
When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.
When the power went out here in NYC, my local phone went dead (and yes, I'm one of those people that keeps an unpowered phone for emergencies). At least my cell phone worked while the batteries at the cell towers held up.
I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.
Repeat after me... VOIP is *NOT* for use as your sole means of contacting emergency services. A landline is the prefered method. I don't know anyone that has VOIP and no landline or cell phone for emergencies.
And, overall, since moving to NYC, my internet connection (cable modem) has been more reliable than my local phone service (lines all owned and maintained by the joyous Verizon).
There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it. We use VOIP phones at work and I recall a situation last year where a hacker brought our internet connection to its knees (hence no VOIP phones) and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out how to make calls. Our solution was to use cell phones for back-up, but I couldn't help but point out if we had regular phones we would have avoided the problem entirely.
The opposite can happen as well. And did to me. The Verizon wires here got crossed and took out my phone line for 3 days. If I'd had VOIP over a cable modem at the time, I'd have been fine.
The thing is, the Flahs player is FREE. So the only reason to write this one is political, not technical.
A GPLed Flash Player could be legally distributed with Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla, etc. If there were a solid one available, I'd bundle it into the default Portable Firefox package rather than having to provide instructions on how to hack it in (and violate the Macromedia license agreement).
Personally, I was more than a bit disheartened when I first found out about how much of OOo 2.0 required Java. While Portable OpenOffice 1.1.4 worked quite well on machines without Sun's JRE installed, I was rather worried how Portable OpenOffice 2.0 would fare (just compiled a test alpha using the latest UPX beta, etc). If they split out a version that didn't require Java installed, I'd probably base Portable OpenOffice on that instead.
Hey, how's the Tiger upgrade work out on your 3.6 GHz machine? Snappier? 64-bit support working for you?
Not too bad in PearPC. Usable for testing websites n such. Snappier with the beta of PearPC. My CPU is only 2 GHz, though (even though the box said 3200+). And 64-bit Windows and Linux work just fine. Why? You having problems with em?:-D
The US used to have this thing called "fair use" where copying that would otherwise be infringing for the purpose of parody was legal. Wonder what happened to that.
The MAFIAA has successfully killed most fair use through technological methods coupled with laws like the DMCA. Add in a dose of SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and the Walmarts of the world can do whatever the hell they want to you.
I often use my MD player to record live DJ sets of myself and friends when we play out. Does anyone make a portable flash recorder that has line inputs? I know my Creative Muvo records, but only through the microphone at terrible quality. Many friends of mine who are also DJs now just bring along a tiny laptop and record continuously to the HD.
For long recordings, you're probably better of with a hard drive-based player. The Archos GMini 220 will record from a line-level source and encode into MP3 format on-the-fly. For info on recording, check section 4.4 of the product manual.
Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.
This is an issue, actually. I've written a page on Safe Portable App-ing that outlines some general guidelines that will help to minimize the risk (and keep it as non-geeky as possible). You'd still be at risk for any nasties that aren't yet know by the A/V software. And, of course, you're always at risk for keylogging and network sniffing on the machine you are using. It's best to keep all this in mind while you're using it.
All that said, there are some USB-based A/V products in the works and some other methods of ensuring application integrity (think hash-checking of all installed apps).
I keep a port version but just upgraded to a desktop verison again. I have yet to check for a new version. This is problem as the port version is always behind the official release.
Actually, I usually release the portable version within 24 hours of the release of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird and NVU. This time is the exception as I've done a major rewrite of the launcher to, among other things, work from anywhere when unzipped (not just the root), work without an INI from some locations, accept local profiles and adjust them on the fly, run side-by-side with a local copy of firefox, and more. Portable Firefox 1.0.2 will be released soon after Firefox 1.0.2. Thunderbird and NVU will follow with new launchers.
As for upgrading, you can just drop your profile from the earlier portable app into the new one. I test for backwards compatibility.
Opera masquerades it's User Agent as I.E. by default. It's actually a bit controversial in the Opera community, as while it reduces their numbers for a long time it increased the number of sites that didn't crap out.
Quite right. Which is why Opera must be checked for before IE. I actually got my webhost's stats provider to upgrade their software by posting a How-To on fixing their configuration to properly detect all modern browsers.
It's good that Firefox is gaining market shares... but what about Mozilla?
The whole mozilla projet (mozilla + firefox) is what *really* matters, not only Firefox!
I believe the Mozilla Suite has lost users to Firefox (and Opera) and is not growing in any significant manner. It's been pretty much stagnant at between 1 and 2 million users for quite a while whereas Firefox has between 40 and 50 million users and is growing month to month.
This could be especially bad news for Firefox if IE 7.0 incorporates MySoft Technology's Maxthon code. I've been running Maxthon for over a month (I started with Version 1.12.00 and recently updated to 1.2.00) and believe me, once you're used to Maxthon it's hard to go back to the "stripped down" Firefox. Not only does Maxthon have tabbed browsing, but also true mouse gestures and the very powerful AD Hunter function, which can block out many online ads that slow down the computer and/or install spyware/adware without your knowledge in addition to blocking out most pop-up ad windows.
But Maxthon is still completely vulnerable to all those nice IE exploits that are dropping spyware on people's machines. *THAT'S* why a lot of people are dropping IE, rather than some usability or feature issue. Heck, I made the mistake of checking out a site in IE for my girlfriend when she was visiting. It auto-installed spyware on my fully patched WinXPSP2 laptop (hadn't installed any BHO protection).
As for ads, just drop in the powerful, full-featured AdBlock extension. The fact is, just about any feature you can think of (and every feature in a shell like maxthon) is available for Firefox as a free, open-source, easily installable extension.
A major difference people may not think of in comparing these machines is the processor speed. At face value you would see that the 12" Powerbook is 1.5ghz is only slightly faster, compared to the Pentium M running at 1.1ghz. I don't have an exact benchmark handy, but the 1.5ghz G4 is probably comparable to a 2.5ghz or faster Pentium.
Quite true. But this applies to Pentium 4 desktop processors. Like a G4, the Pentium M gets more 'work' done per clock cycle than a Pentium 4 or an AMD desktop chip. I don't have figures for the 1.1GHz chip, but a Pentium M 725 (1.6GHz) is roughly equivalent to an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or a P4 3.46GHz with business applications. (AnandTech) So, it looks like a Pentium M performs closer to a G4 per clock cycle than a P4. Like a G4, a PM eats up SETI, too.
Not to mention that its always difficult comparing battery life between laptops. Could be that the 6-11 hour claim from Sony is when the cdrom and hard drive are idle, the display is turned off, and wireless internet is turned off, or something crazy like that.
Of course its also possible that Apple's 5-hour claim is possible but impractical, and Sony's 6 hour claim is with everything possible turned on.
Oh, quite true. Apples up to 5 hours is possible with a new Powerbook and doing lightweight stuff (no wireless, more time reading stuff onscreen than doing anything with the processore, dimmed)... same as with the Sony. The up to 11 is possible under the same circumstances... but this is mainly due to the crazy-efficient Penitum M Ultra Low Voltage processor. If IBM came out with a similar CPU and Apple built an ultraportable out of it, I'll bet they'd achieve similar numbers.
That laptop you mentioned is double the cost of an iBook though.
That Sony VGN-T150 is quite a different animal than anything Apple offers. It uses an Ultra Low Voltage Penitum M running at 1.1GHz. That's how it gets 6 to 11 hours of battery life with the extended-life battery.
The closest you could get with an Apple would be the 12-inch Powerbook with a Super Drive at $1700. The Sony runs between $1900 and $2000. But it's only 3.1 lbs compared to the Powerbook's 4.6 lbs and the battery life it gets is quite amazing. (even compared to the Powerbook's "up to 5 hours")
Of course, we're really comparing apples to oranges here (no pun intended) as these are very different machines for different needs.
Opera has had tabs for a very, very long time, Netcaptor or MyIE2 only got the idea from Opera and tried to impliment it using the Internet Explorer engine. Get your facts strait my friend, Opera has been around ALOT longer then most other Browsers and has been using a Multi Document Interface since version 1.0 (although i'm not exactly sure when tabs came into play, however i Highly doubt it was afer those two IE nock offs)
Opera has had MDI since, I believe, its inception. Tabs came later, though. I remember using it without tabs back when I bought it. Though, I never bought another version after that. These days, I'm a Firefox user.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, I think Galeon had tabs before Opera did.
Can we get a realistic test? Lets see how quick IE is after a couple of days browsing some of the.... less family friendly websites. Firefox would rape it hands down.
Slashdot Mirror
I've also released a test version of Portable Firefox based on the new release for anyone that would like it portable... or anyone that wants to try it out without messing with their local profile or Profile Manager.
/ deer_park/
Portable Firefox: Deer Park 1.5 RC1:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox
For the unfamiliar, Portable Firefox allows you to carry your whole web browser along with all your bookmarks and extensions with you on an iPod, USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it right into any Windows computer and use it just like you would on your own. It is a repackaged version of the popular Mozilla Firefox browser designed with portability in mind, so it has all the same great features of Firefox, but there's nothing to install.
I use Thunderbid for 8 different IMAP accounts, that I can easily check and switch between. Not to mention moving messages between them or to my local mail store. All in a secure client that remembers my passwords to all of them. And created Portable Thunderbird so I can do it from the road, too. Without needing to lug my laptop. And without needing to resort to a crappy webmail interface that is a not-so-close approximation of the features and functionality of a local mail client.
Cool, glad it's working for you now.
Always nice to be appreciated. I just released Portable AbiWord. 2 more apps are about ready to release. And I have more in the pipe.
Working fine for me (I'm the developer). Be sure you've copied NPSWF32.dll from your local plugins directory to the Portable Firefox\plugins directory. Also, keep in mind, that it probably won't work on a PC with no Flash installed.
7 821
If you need further assistance, drop a note in the support topic:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=175
Don't forget that OpenOffice.org has another advantage over Microsoft office... it's portable. Due to it's open source nature, I was able to create a portable version of it (without having to worry about licensing fees, etc). It runs from any removable drive (USB thumbdrive, CDRW, iPod, etc) and is fully functional (though the Java-based stuff won't work if Java isn't installed on the host PC).
e noffice/
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_op
I think there is a downside to it being free. I'd like to see a simple system where I get 30 minutes free with a drink. Not sure how that would work, but it would keep the free loaders out.
I agree with the downside, especially in some locations. My local coffee/tea shop gives you 30 minutes of time with each drink you order. It's only $2 an hour after that. And they even have about a half dozen repurposed laptops with Ubuntu loaded on them available.
There are a few people that work from there for an hour or two (or more) during the day. They just had a going-away party for a regular who was leaving the country.
freezepeach.org
When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.
When the power went out here in NYC, my local phone went dead (and yes, I'm one of those people that keeps an unpowered phone for emergencies). At least my cell phone worked while the batteries at the cell towers held up.
I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.
Repeat after me... VOIP is *NOT* for use as your sole means of contacting emergency services. A landline is the prefered method. I don't know anyone that has VOIP and no landline or cell phone for emergencies.
And, overall, since moving to NYC, my internet connection (cable modem) has been more reliable than my local phone service (lines all owned and maintained by the joyous Verizon).
There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it. We use VOIP phones at work and I recall a situation last year where a hacker brought our internet connection to its knees (hence no VOIP phones) and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out how to make calls. Our solution was to use cell phones for back-up, but I couldn't help but point out if we had regular phones we would have avoided the problem entirely.
The opposite can happen as well. And did to me. The Verizon wires here got crossed and took out my phone line for 3 days. If I'd had VOIP over a cable modem at the time, I'd have been fine.
The thing is, the Flahs player is FREE. So the only reason to write this one is political, not technical.
A GPLed Flash Player could be legally distributed with Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla, etc. If there were a solid one available, I'd bundle it into the default Portable Firefox package rather than having to provide instructions on how to hack it in (and violate the Macromedia license agreement).
Personally, I was more than a bit disheartened when I first found out about how much of OOo 2.0 required Java. While Portable OpenOffice 1.1.4 worked quite well on machines without Sun's JRE installed, I was rather worried how Portable OpenOffice 2.0 would fare (just compiled a test alpha using the latest UPX beta, etc). If they split out a version that didn't require Java installed, I'd probably base Portable OpenOffice on that instead.
Hey, how's the Tiger upgrade work out on your 3.6 GHz machine? Snappier? 64-bit support working for you?
:-D
Not too bad in PearPC. Usable for testing websites n such. Snappier with the beta of PearPC. My CPU is only 2 GHz, though (even though the box said 3200+). And 64-bit Windows and Linux work just fine. Why? You having problems with em?
The US used to have this thing called "fair use" where copying that would otherwise be infringing for the purpose of parody was legal. Wonder what happened to that.
The MAFIAA has successfully killed most fair use through technological methods coupled with laws like the DMCA. Add in a dose of SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and the Walmarts of the world can do whatever the hell they want to you.
I often use my MD player to record live DJ sets of myself and friends when we play out. Does anyone make a portable flash recorder that has line inputs? I know my Creative Muvo records, but only through the microphone at terrible quality. Many friends of mine who are also DJs now just bring along a tiny laptop and record continuously to the HD.
For long recordings, you're probably better of with a hard drive-based player. The Archos GMini 220 will record from a line-level source and encode into MP3 format on-the-fly. For info on recording, check section 4.4 of the product manual.
Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.
This is an issue, actually. I've written a page on Safe Portable App-ing that outlines some general guidelines that will help to minimize the risk (and keep it as non-geeky as possible). You'd still be at risk for any nasties that aren't yet know by the A/V software. And, of course, you're always at risk for keylogging and network sniffing on the machine you are using. It's best to keep all this in mind while you're using it.
All that said, there are some USB-based A/V products in the works and some other methods of ensuring application integrity (think hash-checking of all installed apps).
I keep a port version but just upgraded to a desktop verison again. I have yet to check for a new version. This is problem as the port version is always behind the official release.
Actually, I usually release the portable version within 24 hours of the release of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird and NVU. This time is the exception as I've done a major rewrite of the launcher to, among other things, work from anywhere when unzipped (not just the root), work without an INI from some locations, accept local profiles and adjust them on the fly, run side-by-side with a local copy of firefox, and more. Portable Firefox 1.0.2 will be released soon after Firefox 1.0.2. Thunderbird and NVU will follow with new launchers.
As for upgrading, you can just drop your profile from the earlier portable app into the new one. I test for backwards compatibility.
And as for his other point.h tml
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/index.
Thanks, forgot to mention that in my quick reply.
Opera masquerades it's User Agent as I.E. by default. It's actually a bit controversial in the Opera community, as while it reduces their numbers for a long time it increased the number of sites that didn't crap out.
Quite right. Which is why Opera must be checked for before IE. I actually got my webhost's stats provider to upgrade their software by posting a How-To on fixing their configuration to properly detect all modern browsers.
It's good that Firefox is gaining market shares... but what about Mozilla?
The whole mozilla projet (mozilla + firefox) is what *really* matters, not only Firefox!
I believe the Mozilla Suite has lost users to Firefox (and Opera) and is not growing in any significant manner. It's been pretty much stagnant at between 1 and 2 million users for quite a while whereas Firefox has between 40 and 50 million users and is growing month to month.
This could be especially bad news for Firefox if IE 7.0 incorporates MySoft Technology's Maxthon code. I've been running Maxthon for over a month (I started with Version 1.12.00 and recently updated to 1.2.00) and believe me, once you're used to Maxthon it's hard to go back to the "stripped down" Firefox. Not only does Maxthon have tabbed browsing, but also true mouse gestures and the very powerful AD Hunter function, which can block out many online ads that slow down the computer and/or install spyware/adware without your knowledge in addition to blocking out most pop-up ad windows.
But Maxthon is still completely vulnerable to all those nice IE exploits that are dropping spyware on people's machines. *THAT'S* why a lot of people are dropping IE, rather than some usability or feature issue. Heck, I made the mistake of checking out a site in IE for my girlfriend when she was visiting. It auto-installed spyware on my fully patched WinXPSP2 laptop (hadn't installed any BHO protection).
As for ads, just drop in the powerful, full-featured AdBlock extension. The fact is, just about any feature you can think of (and every feature in a shell like maxthon) is available for Firefox as a free, open-source, easily installable extension.
A major difference people may not think of in comparing these machines is the processor speed. At face value you would see that the 12" Powerbook is 1.5ghz is only slightly faster, compared to the Pentium M running at 1.1ghz. I don't have an exact benchmark handy, but the 1.5ghz G4 is probably comparable to a 2.5ghz or faster Pentium.
Quite true. But this applies to Pentium 4 desktop processors. Like a G4, the Pentium M gets more 'work' done per clock cycle than a Pentium 4 or an AMD desktop chip. I don't have figures for the 1.1GHz chip, but a Pentium M 725 (1.6GHz) is roughly equivalent to an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or a P4 3.46GHz with business applications. (AnandTech) So, it looks like a Pentium M performs closer to a G4 per clock cycle than a P4. Like a G4, a PM eats up SETI, too.
Not to mention that its always difficult comparing battery life between laptops. Could be that the 6-11 hour claim from Sony is when the cdrom and hard drive are idle, the display is turned off, and wireless internet is turned off, or something crazy like that.
Of course its also possible that Apple's 5-hour claim is possible but impractical, and Sony's 6 hour claim is with everything possible turned on.
Oh, quite true. Apples up to 5 hours is possible with a new Powerbook and doing lightweight stuff (no wireless, more time reading stuff onscreen than doing anything with the processore, dimmed)... same as with the Sony. The up to 11 is possible under the same circumstances... but this is mainly due to the crazy-efficient Penitum M Ultra Low Voltage processor. If IBM came out with a similar CPU and Apple built an ultraportable out of it, I'll bet they'd achieve similar numbers.
Wow, that's pretty good.
And eleven hours is amazing. How do you get that?
That laptop you mentioned is double the cost of an iBook though.
That Sony VGN-T150 is quite a different animal than anything Apple offers. It uses an Ultra Low Voltage Penitum M running at 1.1GHz. That's how it gets 6 to 11 hours of battery life with the extended-life battery.
The closest you could get with an Apple would be the 12-inch Powerbook with a Super Drive at $1700. The Sony runs between $1900 and $2000. But it's only 3.1 lbs compared to the Powerbook's 4.6 lbs and the battery life it gets is quite amazing. (even compared to the Powerbook's "up to 5 hours")
Of course, we're really comparing apples to oranges here (no pun intended) as these are very different machines for different needs.
I remember, nostalgically, the days when one of the advertised features of Opera was 'the whole download fits on a single floppy diskette.'
That day is gone forever. It's as bloated and eyecandy ridden as the rest of them now.
Yeah, I remember the same. I used it on my mom's 386 *way* back in the day when nothing much else would run on it.
Opera has had tabs for a very, very long time, Netcaptor or MyIE2 only got the idea from Opera and tried to impliment it using the Internet Explorer engine. Get your facts strait my friend, Opera has been around ALOT longer then most other Browsers and has been using a Multi Document Interface since version 1.0 (although i'm not exactly sure when tabs came into play, however i Highly doubt it was afer those two IE nock offs)
Opera has had MDI since, I believe, its inception. Tabs came later, though. I remember using it without tabs back when I bought it. Though, I never bought another version after that. These days, I'm a Firefox user.
And, as mentioned elsewhere, I think Galeon had tabs before Opera did.
I hate Microsoft too, but let's be fair. Firefox didn't invent tabbed browsing, Opera did. If IE has "stolen" tabs, then so has Firefox.
Actually, I think Galeon had tabs before Opera.
Can we get a realistic test? Lets see how quick IE is after a couple of days browsing some of the.... less family friendly websites. Firefox would rape it hands down.
r /
Internet Explorer can be *very* secure by setting the slider to highest as demonstrated here:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/ie_security_humo