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Mozilla The Internet Portables Hardware

Portable Firefox and Thunderbird 270

Posted by michael from the handy-stuff dept.
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."
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Portable Firefox and Thunderbird More

Portable Firefox and Thunderbird

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  • Been using this for a while (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lordkuri ( 514498 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:57PM (#10997410)
    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.

  • Lateness (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04, 2004 @03:57PM (#10997411)
    Hey slashdot, two weeks ago called. They'd like their news back.

  • Hot damn (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wcitechnologies ( 836709 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:01PM (#10997441)
    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.

  • Looks pretty handy... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eeg3 ( 785382 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:05PM (#10997467) Homepage
    Plus with all the modifications they did for Firefox, such as Download History Cleared, Browser History Disabled, Form Info Saving Disabled, No Disk Cache, and No permanent cookies... it won't take up a very large footprint. Mind you, Firefox installed only takes up a meager 8.6Mb.

    Thunderbird on the other hand compresses EXEs and DLLs with UPX [sourceforge.net]. They also recompressed the JAR files (which are ZIP files).

  • Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DethKing ( 810045 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:05PM (#10997469)
    Now I can use firefox at work where the I.S. Nazi's only allow I.E. morons.. I was actually just talking about this with a co worker to see if I could do it... looks like it was done for me!

  • Nice, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:05PM (#10997470)
    That's nice, but what I really need is a flash drive that doesn't lose data (like the last save from a MSWord file) when it's unplugged from Win 2K without being "ejected" first. Maybe a flash drive with its own OpenVMS file system.

    Why do I have this bad habit? Because I first started using flash drives on Win98SE, and those manufacturer's drivers always flushed the data to the drive when available. I could unplug them the moment the drive actvity led stopped flashing. When I "eject" the flash drive from 2K, I can see Windows do a final file access to it before telling me it's safe to disconnect. Leaves me really wondering what happens to data in the drive when I get a power failure or BSoD before an eject.

    • Re:Nice, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 )
      In linux, doing "mount -o async /dev/ABCD /path/to/mount" should tell the kernel to immeidately flush this buffer to disk immediately.

      This is the setting I use on my thumbdrives and floppes while using Linux.

      I fail to find information about Windows asynch-like commands on storage devices.. though Sysinternals did create a WIndwos-like sync command.

      • Re:Nice, but... (Score:4, Informative)

        by ezzzD55J ( 697465 ) <slashdot5@scum.org> on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:33PM (#10997630) Homepage
        In linux, doing "mount -o async /dev/ABCD /path/to/mount" should tell the kernel to immeidately flush this buffer to disk immediately.

        That is awfully wrong. async does the opposite; it performs i/o asynchronously, not taking care to leave the metadata in a consistent state. Fast (esp. vs. synchronous on harddisks) but dangerous (esp.. etc). If it helps at all in this setting, you'd want sync.

    • Re:Nice, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by squallbsr ( 826163 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:21PM (#10997554) Homepage
      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...

      • Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

        by silverfuck ( 743326 )
        What if (as in every case I've seen on win2k, but it probably depends upon the device or controller or something), the write caching option is greyed out, yet write caching is evidently enabled as it still blows rasberries when you yank it out without first having told it to eject it?

  • Paradigm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by j1bb3rj4bb3r ( 808677 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:08PM (#10997482)
    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.

  • Still Windows Only? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:08PM (#10997488) Homepage
    In the MozillaZine Forum [mozillazine.org], many discussed putting the win32 and linux binaries on a single stick & having them share profiles. Might as well throw in the Mac binaries too & then you'd have something really useful!
    • I'm soooo waiting for someone to do that (and too lazy to do it myself).

      I work on 'doze, Linux and OS X. I dream of having *one* copy of all my mail and bookmarks etc on a USB drive, and FF+extensions and TB+extensions for all three platforms on the same drive.

      I bet someone could make money selling drives with that pre-installed...
    • In the MozillaZine Forum, many discussed putting the win32 and linux binaries on a single stick & having them share profiles. Might as well throw in the Mac binaries too & then you'd have something really useful!

      It's on the ToDo list. That's the eventual goal.

  • Might be nice... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by david_594 ( 735508 )
    A nice touch for this would be to have the USB drives autorun launch a scrip that would identify if its plugged into its "home" computer and would then sync up its boormarks with the computer.

  • All you need to do is use Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)

    by justinarthur ( 564449 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:15PM (#10997520) Homepage
    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 [mozilla.org]. 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.

    • and you can plop Mozilla right onto a flash drive from the zip file builds available from the Mozilla.org Foundation.

      Mozilla Firefox also has a zip version [mozilla.org], but that doesn't mean you can just plop it on removable media and expect it to store its settings there automatically. It still loads and saves its settings right on your hard drive. Can Mozilla store settings on the same drive that its zip was extracted to when regular Mozilla Firefox builds don't, even if the drive letter changes between machine

  • A few years ago I found that portable version of Internet Explorer, that was just a single executible file.

    In light of this new portible Firefox release, I'd like to point out that Portable IE blew goats. It crashed ALL THE TIME, and lacked functional from IE (which lacks functionality anyway!).

    I haven't had a chance to use portable firefox yet, but somehow I know I won't be disapointed.

    The funny thing is that Portable IE was released by microsoft themselves

    • Since IE is on every windows computer, and IE does not work on anything else, the thing you were carrying is either the binary -- which is useless by itself (it does not have the renderer, just the UI) or possibly a shortcut.

      In light of this new portible Firefox release, I'd like to point out that Portable IE blew goats. It crashed ALL THE TIME, and lacked functional from IE (which lacks functionality anyway!).

      ok -- maybe it is ie light. Still the same thing. Why not just carry the iexplore.exe -- it wi
  • I've been using this over a networked drive in the computer labs for quite a while now and it works great. It takes a while to start over the nework, but it is nice to have my bookmarks and cookies with me whichever windows computer i"m on. And it provides a nice bit of security since the browser is on my person network space and there isn't any way the next stranger who hops on the computer could stumble on my history or anything. (sure if someone really wanted to they could, but since everyone else use

  • Unison + USBKey = r0x0r (Score:4, Interesting)

    by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:20PM (#10997552)
    Whatever you use make sure to drop unison on your USB key. That way you can sync bidirectionally all kinds of stuff. Try it with home directory, emacs, eclipse etc.

    It's double plus good.

    • Re:Unison + USBKey = r0x0r (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kaimelar ( 121741 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:42PM (#10997676) Homepage
      Whatever you use make sure to drop unison on your USB key.

      Unsion can be found at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ [upenn.edu]

      From the Web page: "Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other."

      Seems like the parent post was correct -- this may come in handy on my newly-aquired USB drive.

  • Already Done (Score:2, Informative)

    by CypherXero ( 798440 )
    Don't forget that a few other people have created portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, including myself. To check out my development, go here [collegechixors.com].

  • Will it fit? (Score:3, Informative)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:38PM (#10997659)
    If you're running low on space by the time you hit thunderbird, you could also try jbmail [pc-tools.net] which similarly is a secure mail client that can be run straight off removable media (but is very small, 1 mb). but it doesn't share data with firefox. Hell, it doesn't do HTML either (displays as text) which may be a shortcoming or a feature depending on how paranoid you are...
  • I'm having a problem at work. My desktop machine was just refreshed (lease ended on old machine, so I was issued a new machine). It looks like the IT department has disabled USB devices under W2K (I'm guessing they're worried I might be too productive). If I plug in a jump drive, or a palm pilot, W2K doesn't sense it. But, if I reboot with the USB device plugged in, the BIOS will see it (and, if I remember correctly, W2K will see it after the reboot). Does anyone have an idea what I can do to enable th
  • I'm something of a big fan of Bart's Portable Evironment Windows boot disc [nu2.nu]. Native R/W ntfs support, supports McAfee command line virus scanner (with a custom gui), adaware, networking support and many other useful plugins. All in all, a great recovery tool. I wonder if this here portable firefox would work with the Bart boot disc. It would make a nice addition to an alreay powerful tool.
  • I'm handing out USB flash drives this season with software pre-installed on them. Portable Firefox will be the prime app on the drive.

  • How about Linux/Windows sync? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RKBA ( 622932 ) * on Saturday December 04, 2004 @04:51PM (#10997720)
    I would be more interested in knowing how to use the same email directory and profile settings with both my Linux version of Thunderbird and my Windows version of Thunderbird. Has anyone ever tried this?
  • what would be really usefull is being able to run Firefox from an online location, so you don't even have to take a flash drive with you - as long as your connected to the internet you have access to your firefox.

  • Great Combo... (Score:3, Informative)

    by jtmas83 ( 794264 ) * on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:09PM (#10997801)
    I've been using Protable Firefox for the past few weeks. This with the addition of the Bookmark Synchronizer Extension [mozilla.org], this makes sure I always have my favorite browser and all of my bookmarks with me at all times.
  • Subject says it all.

  • Similar project: Friedfox (Score:5, Informative)

    by paulproteus ( 112149 ) <slashdot AT asheesh DOT org> on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:34PM (#10997967) Homepage
    I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access. In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it.

    Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go [mozdev.org].
    You can check out my cheesy web site for it [mozdev.org].

    I plan to set up a separate Internet2 mirror for college students soon. I'll announce this on the mailing list within a week or two.

  • Cool, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheTomcat ( 53158 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @05:37PM (#10997979) Homepage
    This is cool, but I currently have the following setups, and I keep them pretty well in sync:

    Laptop - Linux (Primary Work)

    Laptop - Win (Primary Play)

    Desktop - Win (home)
    Admittedly, I have to keep my extensions in sync, but to keep data, here's what I do:

    For Thunderbird

    • I use only IMAPS, and keep everything on my server
    • I don't use the integrated Junk Mail controls. I did for a while, but got sick of having to start from scratch with every wipe of windows/every new install; nor do I use the filters in my mail client
    • I do, instead, use procmail and spamassassin to accomplish similar results. Spamassassin "learns" from INBOX.Junk.confirmed, every night. Procmail filters my list subscriptions, and I use this tip [texturizer.net] to keep Thunderbird in line.

    For Firefox:
    • I don't keep any bookmarks, locally, except my live bookmarks (which, again, admittedly, I need to set up on each instance).
    • Instead, I use my del.icio.us account [del.icio.us] to manage these. I then subscribe to my account's RSS as a live bookmark, and dump that into my bookmarks toolbar. This [mozdev.org] may be helpful, if you'd like to do the same.

    So with these little tricks, I'm able to keep all three environments pretty much in sync. I know, this isn't for everyone -- I don't expect everyone to have 200+MB of IMAP space, or do I expect them to know how to write procmail rules, but it works for me.

    S

  • I prefer having a portable linux distro that works on windows and linux. See PVPM [metropipe.net]

    Then again, if you are a tech who needs to download files directly to the comptuer you are servicing, PortableFireFox is probably the better bet.

  • A solution... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Maxim Kovalenko ( 764126 )
    I wish I would have heard about this one sooner. I have been stuck in IE land on the PC's at my college due to the "Clean Slate" software that has ben installed on our computers on campus. However since we have a number of people running C compilers off of USB drives they havent disabled the USB ports yet. Looks like campus browsing just got a lot more pleasant.

    • Seems useful (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Massamune ( 836668 )
      This is really handy for those cases where you want to take your customized browser with you. Using the bookmarks off my thumb-drive I never have to worry anymore. Not to mention I can take this to the library or wherever I want and I can use firefox there isntead. An excellent idea.
  • Does this Portable Firefox run off of read-only media (i.e. can you run it right off a CD-ROM, not CD-RW)?

    (Some people mentioned read-only USB memory above, but I didn't get whether or not it actually worked).

    Also, is there a Linux or OSX build somewhere that runs from read-only media?

    Thanks in advance.

  • works for me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wannasleep ( 668379 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @07:55PM (#10998635)
    Hi, I use it every once in a while.

    It liberated me from taking my laptop with me when I visit geek friends (there is always a free laptop I can use).
    Also, if I am in an emergency and need to read email etc. I use my usb drive that I always carry. Webmail and simply using somebody's else computer are not an option with me as I need to use ssh to forward ports, both for my private email (that I host at home) and my work email/intranet.

    Having said that, it is a little bit slow, although it may be because it is reading from a flash drive, but I can wait.
    They should be documented a little bit better. For instance, they tell you that you can only install it in the main directory of the drive, but if you simply change the .ini file you can really put it everywhere.
    I have not figured out how to handle multiple profiles though.
    All in all, I am very happy with it.THANKS!
  • Firefox seems stable, lightweight, and full featured (for Web browsing). It's also the center of the browser development zeitgeist, and now I can use it on both my computer and my phone. So why am I sticking with Mozilla? Why shouldn't I switch to FireFox? Corollary question: why has the Mozilla team created their own toughest competition?
  • I need to start carrying around games like that. That way I can play on my work machine w/o breaking the rules and installing software :-)

  • Developer's Plans PLUS Portable Sunbird & NVU (Score:5, Informative)

    by CritterNYC ( 190163 ) on Saturday December 04, 2004 @08:59PM (#10998950) Homepage
    Well, I guess the cat is fully out of the bag now anyway. I was planning on mentioning this on Slashdot once I got everything over on MozDev finally (my server went over my bandwidth limit last month just from all the blog and tech site mentions... first time that's happened since I released Portable Firefox back in June).

    In the past couple days, I've added launchers and instructions for Portable NVU [johnhaller.com] and Portable Sunbird [johnhaller.com]. Ready-to-use, fully-compressed packages will be forthcoming over the next week.

    The releases are Windows-only for now. The launcher uses the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System [sourceforge.net] at the moment, which isn't compatible with Mac OSX.

    I'm currently working on automating the full build process and switching to 7-zip for compression. Once done, I'll be releasing Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird in all localized languages supported by Firefox and Thunderbird.

    Future plans include:
    - Sync utility, running from the portable install, to copy bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc back and forth
    - Multi-OS install on the portable media, so the applications will run from every computer you use.
    - Support for Enigmail/GPG out-of-the-box (Another developer has repackaged Portable Thunderbird with these included. I'll be updating my launchers to support this by default)
    - Single, combined launcher for all products
    - Full theme support
    - Lots more?

  • This is news, how? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sepluv ( 641107 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <yelsekalb>> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @12:00AM (#10999669)
    Must be a slow news day. I've been using the standard builds of both Firefox and Thunderbird on a portable USB drive since 0.1. All the Portable Firefox project does is to optimise builds for this (e.g.: low disk usage). Anyway, the portable Firefox project has been around since June and has been mentioned on /. before.

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