A very useful tip on running Firefox from a USB flash drive (or any removeable media, for that matter). I’ve recently had to use some PCs that aren’t my own which had Opera or some other browser, which I don’t like.
Following this tip, I can have Firefox on my USB drive and use it on any computer. Tested only on Windows XP and 2000.
Run Firefox from removable media
- Copy the Firefox application folder and your profile folder to the removable medium. In this example we will use R:\Firefox for the application folder and R:\FFProfile as the profile folder, assuming the drive letter for the removable media is R:
- Create a simple batch file called R:\Firefox.bat with the following line:
- Optionally, disable the disk cache to reduce the amounts of file writes to the removable storage by entering about:config in the address field of Firefox and set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.
start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile
The reason why a batch file is needed instead of a simple shortcut is that a shortcut uses absolute paths, and since the actual drive letter for the removable media may change depending on which computer it is plugged into, the relative path used in the batch file is guaranteed to work anywhere.
Tip from Firefox Help: Tips and Tricks
Update 13-Oct-04: Another solution is to run a version of Firefox designed specifically to install on a USB drive. See today’s post Portable Firefox for your USB drive
This method doesn’t seem to work if the PC already has Firefox installed on the hard disk, i.e. entries in the registry already pointing to a drive other than R: in your example.
Interesting, Dave. The info comes from the Firefox tips-and-tricks page on the website. That was written when the pre-final versions were out. The tip is still there, at a different location now, though:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_usb
Maybe it doesn’t work if you already have Firefox on a PC, as is your case.
Also check out the other solution mentioned in this post.