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Firefox Tip: Profiles on a USB Drive

March 11, 2004

After working for my high school over the summer a few years back, I got a lovely gift of a 128MB Bonzai USB 1.1 Mini-Drive (link to the USB 2.0 edition). I didn't use it much at first - I didn't really have much of a need to transport files from home. It was useful, sure, just not real often. Then I started using Mozilla what-was-then-Phoenix which suited me well but wasn't installed on every machine I used, especially at school. After a while I put what-was-by-that-point-Firebird on my drive and although it took a little while to load because of the sluggishness of USB 1.1, it worked very well after it was loaded. More recently (on the-hopefully-final-Firefox) I pondered the ability to keep my settings files on my USB drive rather than having a new settings file for every computer I plugged in to. After a little searching, I sorted through some bugnotes about the ability to specify the settings path but that hasn't been implemented yet. A link pointed me in the direction of this page which contains a plethora of interesting firefox tips as well as how to create a batch file to launch Firefox with different setting locations. Because I have a few different drives on my PC, I've created two batch files - one which specifies the drive letter H: for my desktop PC and one that uses F: for the vast number of PCs with the typical drive setup. Both are on the root of my drive and make things a hell of a lot easier. After following the instructions and opening Firefox with the batch file a few times (2 or 3), I had a working profile on my USB drive! I copied my settings from my PC's settings file and off I go with a mobile location for Firefox to store it's settings.

I recommend the process for anyone that runs Firefox off a USB drive. Creating the batch file wasn't even difficult. Startup time is less than 30 seconds and I can take my settings (stored passwords! entire bookmark files!) wherever I go.

Update: Thanks to Dan "The Man" for pointing the way to much more elegant solution by John Haller. You can find his Portable Firefox version on his website or on mozdev.org.

Comments

you could also go to http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/ and you have a better one;)

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