I love the idea of the portable apps, and have tried it over a year now. Firefox is buggier than IE ever dreamed of being, and upgrading software or being asked to every time you use it is annoying. The office apps and pdf reader are decent but still hit or miss if you use them much. Love the planetarium app and the games.
Basically I use(d) this at work where I move around a lot. When it works, it is fantastic, but most of the time it is on the same level of frustration as working thru DOS. I am too old to put up with that crap again.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on Twitter
There must be something wrong with your setup because there are no bugs in the official releases. In the rare case that there is one, it gets fixed almost immediately and re-released.
Specifically Firefox... there are no bugs, and it never asks me to update.
EDIT: If you'd like to give some more information, such as what version of Windows, and what type of flash drive you are using, then maybe someone can help you figure out the issues.
Toshiba is better to the environment than a lot of common electronic companies. Check out Greenpeace's Guide To Greener Electronics 8)
I just have two comments:
I haven't experienced anywhere near the problems you describe.
If I did, then it would probably be the fault of the applications themselves rather than the fact that they have been portabalized.
Oh well, portableapps isn't for everyone I guess.
The whole reason for portable apps IMHO, is that you are not tied to one laptop/desktop computer. By and large I have used it with systems running XP or Vista, a few may have been Milleniums. Kinda expect that some add-ons won't work at the different desktops, understandable. Proxy issues are easy to deal with. It is this whole, 10 minutes or more to load, no it crashed, no it won't load now even though it was working here 20 minutes ago thing that grates me. Then I go to IE and I am in and out in under 4 minutes. Yes Firefox is the biggest headache, because it is the one I will always open when I try and use PA.
Using 2 different flash drives (2 different work sites. Cruzer 8gb.
French horns in the distance. DVC
Well, I'm not sure. Vista and XP would be fine. Millenium would not surprise me if the portable apps are messed, but I'm not the expert...
Firefox Portable starts fast for me. I should time it sometime, but it's definitely under 10 seconds. And i have quite a few addons right now.
As for the flash drive, I've used a Cruzer 4gb for Firefox, Thunderbird and a few other apps. All ran pretty fast and without problems.
So, aside from suggesting fresh installs, which you may have already tried, that's as far as I can help.
Toshiba is better to the environment than a lot of common electronic companies. Check out Greenpeace's Guide To Greener Electronics 8)
To be quite honest, it seems like your biggest gripe is with FirefoxPortable, and that you've just kind of generalized that gripe into "most portable apps suck" type argument. Not a criticism, just an observation. If that's the case then maybe we can help you address that specific issue.
I'm sure you've tried deleting your FirefoxPortable installation, then re-installing and starting a-fresh, but if not that is definitely worth a try.
If you've tried that and still no joy then try running SpeedyFoxPortable.
If that doesn't do anything then I suggest maybe your USB drive is a slow drive. You could try bench-marking it, although I have no good tools to suggest for that. (other users probably can)
As a final alternative, maybe you could try GoogleChromePortable, and see if you find that performance of that portable browser any more favorable over FirefoxPortable.
I've never experienced any of the portable apps taking more than a minute or two to load, even some of the biggest ones like Open Office.
Actually Firefox Portable is fast. Ever tried running it on the hard drive compared t usb? USB drives are REALLY slow compared to HD's. That's why it's unfair to compare speed with 2 program on two different drives. In your case, that's IE and FF/Fx.
Install a fresh copy of FirefoxPortable on a network share and see if it runs good from client machines around the network (put a UNC share shortcut on your USB drive). If it does, you know there's something wrong with your flash memory drive.
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!