PortableFirefox

[Steve R Jones]

Anyone tried this yet?

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more (Note: It will not run from read-only media like a CD-R).

http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/

[Bigjakkstaffa]

I might give it a go, see what it's like.

--Jakk:t

[ShadeZeRO]

I've been using that for a few months...its quite nice actually, dont run firefox.exe tho, run portablefirefox.exe...

otherwise it'll make a profile on ur HD..

[Ol'Tunzafun]

I've been doing this for about a year now. It looked like it might be a passing fad but I have come to depend on having my own homepage, favorites and preferences wherever I happen to sit down. It's a little slow to initialize but once up and running, there doesn't seem to be any real performance hit. Perhaps the slow initialization is due to starting it with a batch file; maybe I should take a look at portablefirefox.exe. The batch file slows it down because I added a line which deletes the cache on startup. This keeps the size of the folder from exceeding the size of the drive. It also affords a measure of security.
Perhaps, of greater utility, is having Thunderbird installed the same way. It gives me all the advantages of both POP3 and webmail. One drawback, which has not daunted me is not being able to designate it as the default email app, which only really comes into play when clicking on a contact us link. If you do this, it installs another instance of Thunderbird on the harddrive and starts storing mail there. I just leave OE as the default and on those rare occasions when I find it necessary to use one of these links I right click it, copy the address to the clipboard and open Tbird.
The two batch files that I use for opening these apps on the flash drive are appropriately named, fox.bat :p and bird.bat :D
I then drag shortcuts to the quick launch and/or desktop, on machines that I use regularly and change the standard batch icon to the appropriate program icon.
Works a treat.;)