Trey Hunner said:
*ProteanThread* said the following on 4/12/2004 7:11 PM:
Mozilla Firebird (now Firefox) used to come in a zip form so it did not
need installation.
It writes settings, plus many files, to local drive. I see that as not
being truly portable. Might as well likewise use a small program hosting
the MS browser control. It too will write to the local drive; especially
it will do a lot of r-w with user settings in the registry. Yet at least
without new directories forcibly created, the way the Moz family does.
IOW, while I expect there are browsers from either family which might well
run from CD (someone confirm?), I cannot view them as truly portable, at
least not in the strictest definition, in that they all write to the drive.
OB1 is quite unusual, both in its being independent, and not even creating
a cache. Other freeware browsers like that are extremely rare. One of only
ones that I can even recall was something I tried a couple of years ago,
built from TCL, called BrowseX.
http://www.browsex.com/
I'll mention that I found BrowseX unpleasant to use, not only visually,
but physically too (responds to mouse actions in a groggy, jolted way).
Yet it is of some conceptual interest at least. That is, one, I believe
it is using an independent rendering engine. Second, I think it does not
leave files behind. Possible I am mistaken on one or both these counts,
as I never looked it over more than briefly. But if not mistaken, then
it would be amongst those very rare exceptions. To the large situation
that freeware web browsers are almost never truly independent, in that
they use one of the major rendering engines, and also interact heavily
with the local drive.
