• Home
• Archives
• Contact Us
• Sitemap

Using Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition On Your USB Thumb Drive

Firefox has come out with a new edition called Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition, which with the help of a USP thumb drive, allows you to bring all your saved history, bookmarks, cookies, and passwords with you wherever you go.

Firefox Portable, with the help of your thumb drive, also has the ability to store everything you do on a shared computer (like at the office) that you don’t necessarily want to share with others (like your boss).

You can download Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition here: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

Once there, click the download link and save the file to your USB Drive. Then open the file through your thumb drive and click on the executable file to install Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition. Now any time you want to launch Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition just click on the FirefoxPortable.exe file on your thumb drive.

If you want to have access to all the same history, bookmarks, cookies, and passwords you have on your home pc using Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition, you can just copy the profile from your home machine to your thumb drive.

You can usually find the files to copy from your home computer in this location on your hard drive:

C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.???\

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.

If you’re using a flash-based portable device, it’s recommended that when you start Firefox Portable for the first time, you turn off your disk cache, password saving and history.

Installing Plugins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.)

With Firefox Portable, plugins work a bit differently than they do in regular Firefox. Here’s how to install some of the most common plugins:

• Flash Plugin – To install Flash, 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…

No Portable Java – Sun’s Java VM needs to be installed on the computer you are working on as it makes a slew of registry entries, etc. However, 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 Java VM installed on the computer you are working on.

Enjoy!