便携火狐--Portable Firefox

Portable Firefox 1.0.4 (USB Drive-Friendly)

This project is an official MozDev project
and will also be hosted at this address:
portablefirefox.mozdev.org

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, but Portable Firefox Live will). This grew out of a mozillaZine forum topic (now split in two: original, followup) back in June of 2004. Any comments or questions can be directed to the current Portable Firefox mozillaZine thread. You'll find me in the forums as CritterNYC. You may also be interested in Portable Thunderbird, Portable Sunbird, Portable NVU and Portable OpenOffice.

Download / Disclaimer

This is an unofficial package (Windows-only for now). It is an official build, but has been modified and a specialized launcher added to make extensions portable. No warranty is expressed or implied.

216,000 downloads and counting...
(even more from P2P, torrents and freeware download sites)

• Download Portable Firefox 1.0.4 Release Candidate 2 [en-US](.zip) (5.55Mb download / 6.94Mb installed)
  [ For download verification, MD5 Checksum: a5a570ad2ab004e87e1488e814a6afea ]
• Additional Languages - You may be able to update Portable Firefox to another language by taking the language pack from your locally installed Firefox from the C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/Chrome/ directory, renaming it to en-US.jar and placing it in the PortableFirefox/Firefox/chrome/ directory. This is unsupported and may or may not work for you. Full localization support will be coming in the future.

Launcher Download - If you'd like to make your own Portable Firefox and use my launcher, it is also available for download.

Support

Please remember that this is a free product that does not come with paid support. Some common issues and recommendations are listed on the support page.

Installation / Use

IMPORTANT: Always be sure to practice Safe Portable App-ing!

To install, just download the ZIP and unzip it to the root directory of your USB drive. It will create a "PortableFirefox" directory and all the requisite directories underneath. To use Firefox on your drive, launch it with the PortableFirefox.exe file in the PortableFirefox directory. Do not launch the firefox.exe file directly, as this will create a profile on your hard drive or use an existing one. Additionally, be sure you've closed any local copies of Firefox and that they've finished shutting down. Otherwise, a new window of your local install will be launched. This is a feature of Firefox itself to prevent multiple copies running at the same time. When finished, exit Firefox and then wait for the activity light on your removable drive to stop flashing, then select the 'Safely remove [device]' option from the icon in the system tray. DO NOT just yank the usb drive out as Firefox may be writing to the disk after you've closed it.

Upgrading

To upgrade to a newer version of Portable Firefox, simply backup your existing profile directory and copy it into the profile directory of the newer version. That's all there is to it.

Copying Your Local Profile

You can copy much of your local profile into Portable Firefox. It is suggested you turn cache and permanent cookies off to preserve drive life if you do. Your local Firefox profile is usually installed in C:/Documents and Settings/[user]/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/default.???/ Those files should be copied to the profile directory on your usb key. Sometimes, certain profiles will cause the launcher to fail or hang. In that case, start from scratch and try just copying your bookmarks.html and saved passwords files. Please do not contact me for assistance in doing this.

Known Issues

The following are known issues with this package:

• avast antivirus - This antivirus package was detecting the launcher as a trojan. Updating your virus definitions (0521-1 or later) should solve the problem.
• Themes and Extensions - Most themes and extensions should now work with Portable Firefox -- including those that make use of the component registry. A handful will still fail, though. A few things to keep in mind:
  1. XPIs must be downloaded* to your PC before installing and then opened using FILE and then OPEN (this is a limitation of Firefox, see Bug 262854).
  2. You should close and then restart Firefox on your current PC after installing an extension.
  3. Extensions That Break: GreaseMonkey, Mozilla Calendar (you can manually update the calendar file to be relative, this will be addressed soon).
• File / Directories Created - A directory (%userprofile%/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox) is created on the local machine (if Firefox is not installed locally) and a pluginreg.dat file is created within it. A Talkback directory is also created. (this is a limitation of Firefox, see Bug 272983)
• No Portable Java - Sun's Java VM needs to be installed locally as it makes a slew of registry entries, etc. 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 locally.
• Read/Write Required - Both the Firefox directory and the Profile directory must be writeable on the USB drive. Drives with a writable switch can not be in read-only mode.
• Network Drives - There has been a report that Microsoft patch MS051-011 may break the ability to run applications from networked drives and that Portable Firefox is affected.
• Non-ASCII Character Directories Fail - It has been reported that the Portable Firefox Launcher does not like working with directories with non-ascii characters. This report came from a Chinese user but is unconfirmed.

*Note: Some may download with a .php extension. You should rename this to XPI and then open it.

Modifications

I made some modifications to the default ZIPped version of Firefox to make it more USB key friendly (decreasing total install size and the number of writes to the drive, which will increase drive life). These changes are listed here so you'll know what they are, and so you can recreate the process, if so desired. Obviously, you can change many of these settings (ex cache, form saving or cookies disabled) by changing the options in Firefox, but you will increase the number of writes to your flash drive, thus decreasing its life.

• Extension-Friendly Launcher - Portable Firefox Launcher 1.0.8 is now included by default. It will alter the paths to any extensions you install to work relatively. Just be sure to download the XPI to your PC and then open it with a FILE - OPEN, followed by a browser close/restart before switching PCs. I still have the .bat launcher available for those who like it.
• EXEs and DLLs Compressed - All EXEs and DLLs were recompressed using UPX. This gets our installed size down to one that works on 16Mb drives. Additionally, it will speed up use of Firefox when you're running over USB 1.1. The options used were: --best --compress-icons=0 --nrv2d --crp-ms=999999 -k
• JARs re-compressed - The JAR files in the chrome have been recompressed at the maximum level, getting our package down to 7.8Mb. (For the curious, JAR files are just ZIP files with a different extension)
• Default Profile - A default profile exists within the firefox directory.
• No Default Browser Check - Firefox won't check to see if it is the default browser on startup.
• Download Prompt - Firefox will ask where to save downloads.
• Download History Cleared - Download history is cleared on exit.
• Browser History Disabled - The history has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
• Form Info Saving Disabled - Information from forms is not saved.
• No Disk Cache - The browser disk cache has been disabled to decrease disk size and the number of writes to the disk, increasing disk life.
• No permanent cookies - Cookies are only saved for the current session. None are written to the disk.
• XUL Cache Disabled - The cache for Firefox interface components has been disabled as well, improving speed over USB and reducing writes.

Future Plans

• 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
• Single, combined launcher for all products
• Full theme support

Please keep in mind that, for the moment, the development team is basically... me. I have gotten some GREAT help from other folks in the mozillaZine forums for suggestions and improvements. MAI, in particular, made invaluable contributions to the launcher.

Additional Options

For further customization, the following options are available:

• Flash Plugin - The Flash plugin, which cannot be included in this package due to Macromedia's restrictive licensing, can be installed by performing the following actions:
  1. Install Firefox on a local directory
  2. Install the Flash plugin from Macromedia's website
  3. Copy the NPSWF32.dll from the plugins folder of your local directory to the plugins folder of your flash drive
  4. (optional) Realize that this "violates" your license agreement with Macromedia and that said license agreement is annoying and unnecessary
• Shockwave Plugin - The Shockwave plugin, which cannot be included in this package due to Macromedia's restrictive licensing, can be installed by performing the following actions:
  1. Install Firefox on a local directory
  2. Install the Shockwave plugin from Macromedia's website
  3. Copy the NP32DSW.dll from the plugins folder of your local directory to the plugins folder of your flash drive
  4. (optional) Realize that this "violates" your license agreement with Macromedia and that said license agreement is annoying and unnecessary
• Bookmarks Synchronizer - The easiest way to keep your bookmarks synced between multiple installs of Firefox is to use the Bookmarks Synchronizer Extension. It will connect to an FTP server and store your bookmarks there in XML format.
• Firefox Drive Icon / Right-click Launch - If you're only using the drive for Firefox and would like the Firefox icon to show up in Explorer and be able to right-click to launch Portable Firefox, save this autorun.inf file to the root directory of the USB drive.
• Firefox Drive Icon / Right-click Launch All Portable Apps - If you're using the drive mainly for my portable Mozilla apps, save this autorun.inf file to the root directory and you'll have a Firefox drive icon along with right-click launches for Portable Firefox, Portable NVU, Portable Sunbird, Portable Thunderbird and Portable OpenOffice.org. You can removed any entries you don't want (it's just a text file).
• Hard Drive Installation - If you install Portable Firefox to a portable hard drive, rather than a flash-based device, it is recommended you reenable inter-session cookies, disk cache, download history, browser history and form info saving. These are only disabled to increase the lifespan of flash-based devices. Re-enabling them will improve the performance and usefulness of Portable Firefox on your device.
• Anonymous Profile - I have created a packaged profile that should allow for pretty secure, anonymous browsing from wherever you are. (Inspired by Nick_W's post) It includes the SwitchProxy and Switch User Agent extensions pre-installed, a sample list of anymous proxies pre-configured for 60-second rotations, disabled passwords/cookies/download history/form saving, disabled HTTP referres, disabled Java and Javascript and a set of bookmarks describing the 2 extensions and offering some resources for finding additional anonymous proxies. To use it, just download a standard Portable Firefox package above and unzip it to your USB key. Head in and clear out the profile directory that is created. Then download the anonymous profile and unzip it to your profile directory. Fire up PortableFirefox.exe as usual. You can enable the Sample List of anonymous proxies or create your own. Please note that this profile is NOT SUPPORTED by me so please do not email me with ANY support requests.

Launchers

• Portable Firefox Launcher 1.0.8 (Included) - This launcher uses some of the methods of Free The Fox and fflaunch to be as flexible and useful as possible. It will rewrite your chrome.rdf to use relative paths for extensions. It can be run from anywhere on the USB drive (including the root). Read the readme.txt for the full details on running it. This launcher is released under the GPL and all code is included. Get Portable Firefox Launcher 1.0.8.
• Batch File Launchers - If you'd like just use a batch file, you can use one that can reside in the firefox directory or one that works from the root directory

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to mai9 for the original Free The Fox launcher on which PortableFirefox is based and tracon for some of the original ideas with fflaunch. Thanks as well to FlashBanG and all the folks participating in the mozillaZine forum thread.

Version History

• 1.0.4 Release Candidate 2 - May 17, 2005
  • Fixed compression of the Firefox directory
  • Released to general public
• 1.0.4 Release Candidate 1 - May 12, 2005
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0.4
  • Updated to PFF Launcher 1.0.8 (adds suppport for renaming firefox.exe)
  • Removed INI from main directory
  • Limited release to 1.0.3 users
• 1.0.3 Beta - April 27, 2005
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0.3
  • Added launcher 1.0.6
  • Removed Talkback
  • Added ability for INI to be in subdirectory
• 1.0.2 Beta - March 23, 2005
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0.2
  • Added ability to pass additional commandline parameters
  • Disabled Firefox update notification
• 1.0.1 Beta 2 (Open) - March 11, 2005
  • New Portable Firefox launcher features:
    • Allow Spaces in directory names
    • Relative Path rewriting (backwards compatibility with pre1.0.1 portable profiles)
    • Local Profile path rewriting
• 1.0.1 Beta 1 (Semi-Closed) - March 2, 2005
  • Minor Polish Adjustments
• 1.0.1 Internal Alpha - February 24, 2005
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0.1
  • Completely new Portable Firefox launcher with:
    • Absolute Paths
    • Optional INI
    • Commandline Passing
    • Multiple Instance Support
    • Extension Install / Uninstall
    • Profile Creation / Detection
    • EXE detection
• 1.0 Final Release - November 9, 2004
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0 Final Release
• 1.0 Release Candidate 2 - November 7, 2004
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate 2
• 1.0 Release Candidate 1 - November 3, 2004
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate 1
  • Added in default bookmarks.html from standard install
• 1.0 Preview Release - September 14, 2004
  • Set cookies to session only to decrease disk writes
  • Updated to Portable Firefox Launcher 0.0.3 due to profile changes
  • Updated to Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
• 0.9.3 (Revision 2) - August 6, 2004
  • Fixed error in Bookmark Manager (packaging issue)
• 0.9.3 - August 4, 2004
  • Added Portable Firefox Launcher by default to automate portable extensions
  • Updated to Firefox 0.9.3
• 0.9.2 - July 10, 2004
  • Updated to Firefox 0.9.2
• 0.9.1 (Revision 2) - July 2, 2004
  • Repaired packaging issue affecting extensions
• 0.9.1 - June 29, 2004
  • Updated to Firefox 0.9.1
• 0.9 (Revision 2) - June 19, 2004
  • Removed Flash plugin due to licensing issues
• 0.9 Final - June 15, 2004
  • Updated UPX comression switches to leave icons alone
  • Updated to Firefox 0.9 Final
• 0.9 RC (Revision 2) - June 11, 2004
  • Disabled browser history and disk cache
• 0.9 RC - June 9, 2004
  • Further compression to 8Mb
  • Re-enabled Java based on feedback
  • Updated to Firefox 0.9 Release Candidate
• 0.8+ (Revision 2) - June 8, 2004
  • Compressed the JARs to decrease size from 11Mb to 9.8Mb
• 0.8+ - June 4, 2004
  • Initial Release with basic edits to a default profile and a .bat launcher.
  • Based on the previous nightly build