M
Mike Hollywood
Hi,
Somewhere along the line i read about using a usb key to run firefox so you
can use your bookmarks on any computer, etc. I googled a bit on it and
found the following buried on the mozilla web site's FAQ. Has anybody tried
this? And if so, how'd you make out? Thanks. Mike
Run Firefox from removable media
This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media,
such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to
run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that
don't have Firefox installed. It has only been
tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:
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:
start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile
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.
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.
Many of the tips and tricks mentioned on this site require you to edit
configuration files for Firefox. There are three files
that you should know about:
user.js
Used to change various preferences.
userChrome.css
Used to change the appearance of the browser.
userContent.css
Used to change the appearance of web pages.
All these files are plain text files stored in your profile folder and can
be edited using a standard text editor, such as
Notepad or Texturizer on Windows and gedit or kate on Linux.
Locate your profile folder
Before the configuration files are presented, you should know how to find
your profile folder, which is where Firefox saves
all your settings on your hard drive.
On Windows XP/2000, the path is usually
%AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a
random
string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User
Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and
the rest should be obvious.
On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application
Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
On Linux, the path is usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/
On Mac OS X, the path is usually ~/Library/Application
Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
%AppData% is a shorthand for the Application Data path on Windows 2000/XP.
To use it, click Start
Somewhere along the line i read about using a usb key to run firefox so you
can use your bookmarks on any computer, etc. I googled a bit on it and
found the following buried on the mozilla web site's FAQ. Has anybody tried
this? And if so, how'd you make out? Thanks. Mike
Run Firefox from removable media
This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media,
such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to
run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that
don't have Firefox installed. It has only been
tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:
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:
start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile
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.
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.
Many of the tips and tricks mentioned on this site require you to edit
configuration files for Firefox. There are three files
that you should know about:
user.js
Used to change various preferences.
userChrome.css
Used to change the appearance of the browser.
userContent.css
Used to change the appearance of web pages.
All these files are plain text files stored in your profile folder and can
be edited using a standard text editor, such as
Notepad or Texturizer on Windows and gedit or kate on Linux.
Locate your profile folder
Before the configuration files are presented, you should know how to find
your profile folder, which is where Firefox saves
all your settings on your hard drive.
On Windows XP/2000, the path is usually
%AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a
random
string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User
Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and
the rest should be obvious.
On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application
Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
On Linux, the path is usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/
On Mac OS X, the path is usually ~/Library/Application
Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
%AppData% is a shorthand for the Application Data path on Windows 2000/XP.
To use it, click Start