Firefox Portable FAQ
Firefox Portable FAQ
Firefox Portable FAQ
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To install Firefox Portable, just download the portable package at the top of the Firefox
Portable page and then double-click it. Select the location you wish to install to and
click OK. A FirefoxPortable directory will be created there and all the necessary files
installed. That's all there is to it.
Stay Safe - When using portable apps, it's always a good idea to practice Safe
Portable App-ing.
Removing Your Drive - When you're done, exit Firefox and then wait for the
activity light on your removable drive to stop flashing. This may take a minute
or more on slow drives or computers. Then select the 'Safely remove [device]'
option from the icon in the system tray. If you remove the drive while it is
writing, you may lose data.
To upgrade to a newer version of Firefox Portable, just install a new copy of Firefox
Portable right over your old one. All your data will be preserved. You can use the built
in updater as well, but some non-personal files or directories may be left behind. This
will be addressed in an upcoming release.
If you're upgrading from Portable Firefox (older name and directories), make a copy of
your existing profile folder within the PortableFirefox\Data\profile directory on your
portable drive. Then download the new version of Firefox Portable and copy your
profile from the old version into the new version within FirefoxPortable\Data\profile. If
you added any plugins or searchplugins, you should copy those directories as well
(PortableFirefox\plugins to FirefoxPortable\Data\plugins and PortableFirefox\firefox
\searchplugins to FirefoxPortable\App\firefox\searchplugins).
If you're using a local copy of Firefox, you may wish to just copy your local Firefox
settings right into Firefox Portable. Your local Firefox profile is usually installed in
C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
\default.???\ After running Firefox Portable once to let it setup its data directories, just
copy the contents of that folder (except the cache directories) to the
FirefoxPortable\Data\profile directory. Then, and this is important, delete the file
FirefoxPortableSettings.ini within the FirefoxPortable\Data\settings directory, if there
is one. When you start Firefox Portable for the first time, it's recommended that you
turn off disk cache, password saving and history if you're using a flash-based portable
device. You can set all of these within the Privacy tab of the Firefox Options window.
Sometimes, certain profiles will cause the launcher to fail or hang. It's best to give it a
few minutes to see if it's just checking compatibility and adjusting the locations of the
extensions before giving up on it. If it fails, it is usually due to an incompatible
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extension.
A second profile can allows you to setup another set of settings (bookmarks,
extensions, preferences, etc) for Firefox Portable that you can use independent of your
main settings. This is useful for sharing a flash drive with someone, testing extensions
and configuration options or separating our work from personal details.
To use a second profile, install the Firefox Portable 2nd Profile 1.0 app in the same
PortableApps directory that FirefoxPortable is in (so, if Firefox Portable is installed to
X:\PortableApps\FirefoxPortable, you'd install this to X:\PortableApps
\FirefoxPortable2ndProfile). In the PortableApps.com Menu, it will show up as "Mozilla
Firefox, Portable Edition 2nd Profile". You can easily rename it to something more
useful by right-clicking and selecting rename. When you run it, it will start Firefox
Portable up with your second profile without affecting your main profile. You can even
install a 3rd or 4th profile by installing the 2nd Profile app again to another location
(like X:\PortableApps\FirefoxPortable3rdProfile) and then renaming it in the
PortableApps.com Menu.
Note that only one profile can be used at a time, even with MultipleInstances turned on
in the advanced launcher INI. This is a limitation of Firefox itself.
With Firefox Portable, plugins work a bit differently than they do in regular Firefox.
Here's how to do some of the most common plugins:
Flash Plugin - To install Flash, you can either try our easy to use Flash
installer for Firefox Portable, or follow these steps:
1. Flash is available as an extension. Just click the link.
2. You'll probably see a yellow bar across the top of the browser (if not, skip
to Step 5), on that bar, click Edit Options
3. In the popup window, click Allow to add PortableApps.com to your
whitelist and then click close
4. Now try the link again
5. You'll see a popup asking if you would like to install, click OK after the
countdown and follow along the prompts
Shockwave Plugin - To install Shockwave, follow these steps:
1. Download the free Shockwave Player from the Macromedia website
2. Run the installation routine and, instead of letting it install to a local
browser, select to choose your browser
3. Browse to X:\FirefoxPortable\App\firefox (where X is your device's driver
letter) and continue with the installation
4. You may need to restart Firefox Portable for the changes to take effect
Other Plugins - Other plugin directions are coming soon...
If the above fails, try the alternate (and more geeky) method:
1. Install the plugin in a local copy of Firefox (on your hard drive)
2. Locate your plugins directory (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\)
3. Copy the plugin you need from there to your FirefoxPortable\Data\plugins
directory (Some Exmaples: For Flash, copy NPSWF32.dll... for Shockwave, copy
np32dsw.dll)
Notes: It should be noted that Adobe Flash does *not* officially support running in any
portable configuration. And, as it is a closed source application, we can neither modify
it nor package it into a more portable-friendly installer. It should also be noted that it
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Firefox Portable supports the ability to set other portable apps as helper apps to
handle additional document types even as you move between PCs. So, you can set
Sumatra PDF Portable as your PDF viewer, OpenOffice.org Portable as your DOC
opener and VLC Media Player Portable as your AVI handler and it will all work as you
move to other PCs.
The setting to do this in Firefox Portable works just like it does in a regular install of
Firefox:
Now, when you click on a file of that type in Firefox, it will open it in the portable app
you selected. The PortabableApps.com Launcher takes care of any needed changes as
you move between PCs.
Note: If you don't see the file type you'd like in the list of file types, that means
Firefox doesn't know about it yet. Just search for a file of that type in Firefox and click
on it. It'll either ask you what you'd like to open it with (in which case, just select the
portable app you'd like to use) or it will automatically associate it with an application
or plugin installed on the local PC. At that point, you can then follow the instructions
above to tell Firefox to use a portable app to open that type of file.
Mailto Note: Mailto links are not controlled by Firefox's mimetypes setup, so this has
no effect on being able to click on an email link and launching Thunderbird. Firefox
simply passes mailto links to Windows and has it open the default mail client.
Privacy Note: When Firefox hands off a file to another application, it will usually store
that file in the local PC's TEMP directory. This file may be left behind if you close
Firefox Portable before closing the application launched to view the file and that
application locks the file (for example, Microsoft Word locks .doc files while it has them
open). Just close the helper app before closing Firefox Portable to ensure any opened
files are deleted. (This issue will affect any portable software that passes a document
to another via the TEMP directory, not just Firefox Portable and not just applications on
the PortableApps.com Platform.)
Firefox Portable runs quite well from faster flash drives (and portable hard drives or
iPods) when connected to a USB 2.0 port. But what if your flash drive is a bit below
average speed-wise (and just because it says "USB 2.0" on it, doesn't mean it's fast)?
Or what if you're stuck connecting to USB 1.1 ports at work or school? Well, there are
a few ways to improve performance.
First off, it helps to realize why things are slow. Firefox Portable has to read and write
bits of data to and from your portable device while it's running. On most flash drives,
every time something is written, all reads stop. When this happens, Firefox Portable
can appear to "freeze" or "hesitate" momentarily. Add to this the fact that most flash
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drives aren't as fast as they promise. They all say "USB 2.0 high speed" on them, but
they're actually limited by the speed of the memory chips inside them and the
controller chip that handles communication between those chips and a PC. There's
about a 40x speed difference between a slow drive and a fast drive when dealing with
writing small amounts of data. And, even if a drive can write a 5mb MP3 file quickly, it
may be slow with writing lots of tiny files.
In Firefox 3.5 and later, this was changed so that now session restore is
disabled this way:
As you move between different computers, you may encounter systems on networks
that use proxies and don't allow direct access to the internet. You'll need to update
Firefox Portable' connection settings to use in the new environment. You can find these
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settings within Tools - Options - General - Connection Settings. If you routinely use
PCs with different proxy settings (for example, work and home or work and school),
you can set up the options for both and easily switch between them with the
SwitchProxy extension. If you need to determine the connection settings of the PC
you are on to add to Firefox Portable, just run our Proxy Get Utility and it will let you
know what they are.
Firefox Portable supports running from a CD right out of the box, and it's a snap. Start
off by downloading and installing Firefox Portable to your hard drive... it doesn't
matter where. Run it at least once to generate the default settings. Then, customize it
as needed, being sure not to move FirefoxPortable.exe or any of the other critical files.
Next, download FirefoxPortable.ini and save it to the same directory as
FirefoxPortable.exe. Then, burn the whole FirefoxPortable directory to a CD and you're
ready to go. Note that Firefox doesn't actually support running directly from read-only
media, so the portable app and the profile are copied to the local PC's temp directory
and run from there.
If you use Firefox Portable from a USB flash drive with a write-protect switch, you're
covered, too. The Firefox Portable Launcher will automatically detect when you protect
the drive and offer to run your files locally for you.
Additional information about the options in the INI is provided in the readme.txt file
within the FirefoxPortable\Other\FirefoxPortableSource directory. Please note that you
must follow Mozilla's Trademark Distribution Guidelines if you are distributing your
customized version to anyone else.
Trojan/Virus detected - AntiVir and Avast, on more than one occasion, have
claimed there is a trojan or virus in the launcher. This is due to poor detection in
both products that will occasionally mis-identify many NSIS-based applications
as trojans. It will usually occur after a definitions update. You should contact
your antivirus provider and let them know of their mistake. Do not contact me
about it as I am well aware of Avast and AntiVir's issues and can do nothing to
fix them. You can either wait for them to fix the issue again or switch to a better
antivirus package.
Renaming FirefoxPortable.exe - Once on your portable device, the launcher
can be renamed to anything you'd like except for firefox.exe. It tries to detect
an existing instance of Firefox so it doesn't just launch a new local one and if it is
named firefox.exe, it will detect itself.
Themes and Extensions - Most themes and extensions should now work with
Firefox Portable -- including those that make use of the component registry. A
handful will still fail, though. A few things to keep in mind:
Some XPIs must be downloaded to your PC before installing and then
opened using FILE and then OPEN (this is a limitation of Firefox, see Bug
262854). If you can't easily download the XPI locally (like with the
Google Toolbar), simply enable your cache temporarily (Tools - Options -
Privacy - Cache - enter 1000 and click OK) and then install the extension.
Don't forget to disable the cache again after installing. Oddly,
addons.mozilla.org doesn't seem affected by this.
No Portable Java - Sun's Java VM needs to be installed locally as it makes a
slew of registry entries, etc. There is no way to make it portable at present, so
you will only be able to use Java-enabled sites on machines that have the Sun
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I made some modifications to the default version of Firefox to make it more USB key
friendly (decreasing the number of writes to the drive, which will increase drive life).
These changes are listed here so you'll know what they are, and so you can recreate
the process, if so desired. Obviously, you can change many of these settings (ex
cache) by changing the options in Firefox, but you will increase the number of writes to
your flash drive, thus decreasing its life.
Firefox Portable grew out of a mozillaZine forum topic (now split in two: original,
followup) back in June of 2004 (I'm there as CritterNYC).
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Optional INI
Commandline Passing
Multiple Instance Support
Extension Install / Uninstall
Profile Creation / Detection
EXE detection
1.0 Final Release - November 9, 2004
Updated to Firefox 1.0 Final Release
1.0 Release Candidate 2 - November 7, 2004
Updated to Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate 2
1.0 Release Candidate 1 - November 3, 2004
Updated to Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate 1
Added in default bookmarks.html from standard install
1.0 Preview Release - September 14, 2004
Set cookies to session only to decrease disk writes
Updated to Firefox Portable Launcher 0.0.3 due to profile changes
Updated to Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
0.9.3 (Revision 2) - August 6, 2004
Fixed error in Bookmark Manager (packaging issue)
0.9.3 - August 4, 2004
Added Firefox Portable Launcher by default to automate portable
extensions
Updated to Firefox 0.9.3
0.9.2 - July 10, 2004
Updated to Firefox 0.9.2
0.9.1 (Revision 2) - July 2, 2004
Repaired packaging issue affecting extensions
0.9.1 - June 29, 2004
Updated to Firefox 0.9.1
0.9 (Revision 2) - June 19, 2004
Removed Flash plugin due to licensing issues
0.9 Final - June 15, 2004
Updated UPX comression switches to leave icons alone
Updated to Firefox 0.9 Final
0.9 RC (Revision 2) - June 11, 2004
Disabled browser history and disk cache
0.9 RC - June 9, 2004
Further compression to 8Mb
Re-enabled Java based on feedback
Updated to Firefox 0.9 Release Candidate
0.8+ (Revision 2) - June 8, 2004
Compressed the JARs to decrease size from 11Mb to 9.8Mb
0.8+ - June 4, 2004
Initial Release with basic edits to a default profile and a .bat launcher.
Based on the previous nightly build
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