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Not truly independent. Firefox portable is not truly independent.

Futurepower tm - July 21, 2009 - 2:44am

Firefox portable is not truly independent. It cannot be run at the same time as the non-portable version. Trying to do that gives this error message: "Another instance of Firefox is already running. Please close other instances of Firefox before launching Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition."


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Designed to be that way

I think it prevents cross contamination of Firefox files, by the other instance, but
it can be turned off within the ini file. I don't know where it's located (the ini file), maybe some else can tell you, but it's a design feature, not a flaw and doesn't affect Firefoxes ability to be portable.

Open Source...., the choice of a GNU generation.

Why would you need to do this?

Why would you need to do this? Esp.considering that any one running instance can have multiple tabs and multiple windows open at the same time.

When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

Easy example

You have an installed Firefox on your work machine that you use for business purposes, and, also would like to use FFP with all your personal settings, addons, bookmarks, passwords etc.

It would be nice if you could have both sets open at once, but it is a limitation of the upstream that this simply refuses to work.

Even if you download a completely independent version, such as IceWeasel, it will still refuse to run at the same time as Firfox.

So, yes, it would be great to have, but it ain't gonna happen, until the Moz devteam redo big parts of the core.

You can run multiple

You can run multiple instances of FF, portable or desktop or both. Just turn on multiple instances in the FirefoxPortable.ini

AllowMultipleInstances=true