A Follow up Post to:

Run Multiple Instances of Firefox Portable

to Several Good Reasons for Using Portable Firefox

What is This all About?

The post Run Multiple Instances of Firefox Portable provided some excellent reasons for using different versions of Firefox portable to meet your varying needs. For example you could have versions with lots of add-ons or versions with add-ons that meet particular requirements, or you could set up versions for dealing with mail or RSS feeds or managing sessions for favourite sites.

The main problem was that Firefox Portable can only run a single instance (that is only one version of the portable program) at a time. So you could not have a Firefox Window and multiple tabs for say your email running at the same time as another version dedicated to RSS feed or favourite sites. (Note you can run multiple windows each with its own tabs but these will have the same add-ons, bookmarks and layout)

However a very simple change using a text editor, such as notebook, and moving a file from one folder to another can allow you to run multiple different versions  (instances) of Firefox Portable at the same time! i.e. different main Firefox executable files and the associated portable package of profile, bookmarks, add-ons, etc.

Update – N.B Since starting this tip I have found that there is information out on other blogs so this is not original

What Do You Need to Do?

Firstly you need a version of Firefox Portable- if you don’t have it you can download it here:

portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

In my main PC I have already downloaded both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 portable versions.

(I still use Firefox 2 for one particular add-on  that has not been upgraded for use with Firefox 3)

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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:

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