or Several Good Reasons for Using Portable Firefox

What is This all About?

Making it easy to use Firefox with different settings for different users and/or different purposes as well as being able to quickly and easily create Firefox backups.

A standard installation of Firefox keeps the programs and data (your profile with all the settings, cookies, cache, etc) in separate areas of your hard drive. Normally (unless you have specified a different location at installation or in your OS Setup) Firefox programs will be installed under C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/ and the data will be stored under your Microsoft “Documents and Settings” area with a path like – C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\.

With a Firefox Portable installation you can have all your Firefox programs and data under a set of folders such as:

• C:\Firefox_Main
• C:\Firefox_Small
• C:\Firefox_Blogging

Or you could have:

• C:\FirefoxPortable\

containing

• • Firefox_Main
  • Firefox_Small
  • Firefox_Blogging

and C; can be substituted for any other drive including memory sticks/flash drive and network drives.

Not only is this easy to quickly backup everything using standard backup software or by simply copying the folder structure using standard copy and paste, but it is completely portable using a portable hard drive or USB flash memory.

Update: Following a comment from Ray (see comments below) I should make it clear that the idea is to use multiple copies of Portable Firefox each with it’s own settings instead of creating multiple individual profiles within Portable Firefox.

This is how have Firefox set up on my main PC and I transfer this complete or in part to other PC’s at home and work on a removable hard drive or flash memory.

(Click on Screenshots to enlarge where necessary)

You could even run Firefox over an Internet connection using remote connection software like Logmein or even Windows Home Server, although unless you have a fast broadband connection this could be very slow and you would be better pulling (downloading) the installation to the local machine.

What Do I Do?

Well, I have already said some of the things that can be done based on what I am already doing. The next screenshot shows the files and folders under my Firefox Portable folder:

Here you can see that not only do I have several different versions of Firefox Portable set up for different uses but I also have:

1. Zip Backup versions at various points
2. Data (Slogger and Scrapbook separate from Firefox)*
3. A Copy of the Add-in XPI files

*This needs to be used with care, if you are going to run either Slogger or Scrapbook (or similar) add-ins from more than 1 Firefox version you need to set up separate folders for each version to avoid index problems and conflicts. The advantage of doing this is that you can copy over a version without all the legacy saved pages in Slogger or Scrapbook and start again.

Why Might You Care?

So you can set up multiple versions of Firefox for:

1. Different uses
2. Different users
3. Test Versions
4. Portability
5. Backups

Backups can easily be made by using standard backup utilities or copying methods at the folder or system level and then moved to another computer with ease. You can easily keep copies of known “working” versions before you install new add-ins, make changers to the toolbars or install an upgrade.

ProReviewer Summary

I find Firefox Portable meets all my needs and more so I haven’t used a non-portable install of Firefox for the past couple of years. The ease of backup , the fact that you can save versions at various points as you make changes or install add-ins and the whole “portability” across multiple computers, users and uses makes it a “no-brainer” for me.

What Other Post are Relevant?

Brief 1.1 – Firefox Add-on – Simple BUT Very Effective RSS Reader

Backup – Identify Where the Data Is – Find the Location of Your Information on a Windows Based PC?

TeraCopy – High Speed Copy and Move Files

Firefox Add-on – Statusbars – Get Your Statusbars Organized

Firefox Beta 3 – Use Extension List Dumper Add-on to Find Compatible Extensions

TIP – Format a USB Flash Drive for Speed or File Size – What’s Best and How to Overcome Some Problems

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.