Firefox Portable Support | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives
The location you choose for the installation location will be the drive letter of your flash drive i.e. F:
Just copy the contents of your production profile folder (except the cache directories) to the FirefoxPortable/Data/profile directory.
When you start Firefox Portable for the first time, it's recommended that you turn off disk cache, password saving and history if you're using a flash-based portable device. You can set all of these within the Privacy tab of the Firefox Options window.
browser.cache.disk.enable False
Per Browser will not start up - MozillaZine Knowledge Base you will want do delete history.dat and localstore.rdr (don't know if I did article mentions in relation to Mac OS)
if you need to run in Safe mode use
f:\firefoxportable\firefoxportable.exe -safe-mode
If your home page is on your thumbdrive, don't forget to change your homepage for future use. It will take Firefox quite\ some time to come up the first time as it will be installing extensions. I found it installed and enabled several that I had had as disabled, so you might check through Tools, Options, Addons to check things out.
Ease of Installation, suprisingly simple for those that know where their files are. Great for testing extensions and your Firefox, but is severely limited is portability of data relative to use of important Firefox bookmark features like Keyword Shortcuts, and drive letter based use.
Things you might change:
The main difference is that the profile for Firefox Portable is a lot easier to find.
drive:\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile
Lots of additional files on the c: drive are in bookmarks file but they would either be accessible at home or not available if the the flash drive is used away from home. Web pages on the portable device are okay because they are contained within themsleves, whether working on website, on my own computer with it's files, or anywhere else with a flash drive and the copies on it.
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/q68768wt.Default/k
When you set up for Firefox Portable after starting PFx you will want to turn on cache for duration of session, cookies for duration of session.
To help differentiate your Firefox Portable you might consider using Nightly Tester Tools to change the Titlebar (large extension though), and something better to identify it is not your normal probile by changing the chrome coloring with Color Toolbar(s) to identify profile (DM*) | userstyles.org either as a style or in userChrome.css
If anyone does have an interest see Relative Bookmarks in Bookmarks Use Caes, which is a wiki for a wishlist of features wanted in Bookmarks (suggestions for a future Firefox 3.0 or later).
The following batch files exist on the thumb drive, at home it will usually be F: but certainly varies, and away from home will varies more. So you will have to edit, examine, change, and resave each batch file before running it. Lines can't be wrapped so have forced line breaks and indentation of continuation within code, so you will have to correct the code so that you don't have line breaks where not appropriate.
Just before using your batch files:
Using Windows
File Manager (My Computer) right click on the bat file and choose edit,
make your change for the drive letter assigned to the portable
device, and then save. Then do same for other bat files
you will be running on that system from your portable device.
A_copybookmarks.bat
rem echo sample -- xcopy C:\"Documents and Settings"\
Administrator\"Application Data"\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
\q68768wt.Default\bookmarks.html
f:\firefoxportable\data\profile\bookmarks.html
notepad f:\firefoxportable\data\profile\bookmarks.html
REM file:///c:/copiedsite/ change to file:///f:/copiedsite/
A_update.bat
xcopy c:\copiedsite\*.* f:\copiedsite\*.* /s /h /d /y xcopy c:\camera-canon20d\25pct\*.* f:\25pct\*.* /s /h /d /y rem xcopy C:\"Documents and Settings"\Administrator\"Application Data"\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\q68768wt.Default\*.* q68768wt.default\*.* /s /h /d /y
firefox.bat
Since you have to open the device to see the batch file you can start Firefox Portable without having the drive letter in the batch file. This is the safest batch files shown because it can't destroy anything by copying.
start \FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe REM == http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title= Bookmarks_Use_Cases#Relative_Bookmarks
Additional item you might add to your firefox.bat, for aliased directories, or drives to be called by an alias (#subst)
SUBST w: \firefoxportable\data\profileThis will allow you to refer to your profile in any window on your system even after closing the Command window by the drive name of W: -- when finished you can enter the following from a command window.
SUBST w: /D
If you want to assign drive X: to the current drive
SUBST X: \Help for use of the SUBST Command
c:\>help use of SUBST Command
Associates a path with a drive letter.
SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D
drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
[drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
a virtual drive.
/D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.
Working with SUBST is fairly safe in that it will not allow mess up, there are safeguards for the following:
Verification of SUBST usage and removal of assignments (blank lines after each subst not shown)
c:\>subst W:\: => C:\ X:\: => G:\ c:\>subst w: /d c:\>subst x: /d c:\>subst c:\>
long filenames describes legal filenames in NTFS and MS-DOS. The usee of @ at beginning of a batch file would not work as it is an indication about echoing commands.
Exploring MS-DOS by R.E. Harvey is a subset of his Explorer's Guide to the HP95 (PDF file), and contains references of interest regards to wildcards * ? and MS-DOS filename characters
Uniform Resource Locators (URL) (RFC1738, Dec 1994), Relative Uniform Resource Locators (RFC1808, Jun 1995)
Computing.Net - How to store and retrieve values?, some BAT file inputs and tests
One to clone the original profile into three selectable profiles. The second to select a profile and launch Portable Firefox. The third to save data from the active (last used) to it's original selectable profile.Some items found at Firefox Portable
Main Firefox pages (on-site):
[Customizations, Extensions],
[Tabs],
[Bookmarks],
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