Hello,
I'm in a unique position, it seems.
My company has restrictions on the locally installed FF, therefore many of us run FF portable. Our network admin will not allow us to run programs from network shares (going so far as to delete *.exe from our network shares, regularly), and USB drive use is restricted, so we install to our desktops. Network admin is requesting that we descrease the size of our roaming profiles as well.
It seems the My Documents is a network share on a SAS array, and we are told to place our Thunderbird and Firefox profiles into the My Documents heirarchy. This is all well and good for those of us using local installs; however, those of us using portable FF seem to be SOL. Since we can't place the entire portable FF folder into My Documents (can't run the program from the share), we have to move JUST the profile. I tried moving the profile DIR, and updating settings/FireFoxPortableSettings.ini, to no avail.
Any suggestions on how to do this? I'm hoping there is some possible way.
In short:
FF Portable installed to c:\documents and settings\USER\desktop\FF Portable\
FF Portable Profile to c:\documents and settings\USER\My Documents\MyFFProfile\
Thanks.
-Eric
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You can do this pretty easily; just change the ProfileDirectory option in FirefoxPortable.ini.
[FirefoxPortable]FirefoxDirectory=App\firefox
ProfileDirectory=C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\MyFFProfile
SettingsDirectory=Data\settings
PluginsDirectory=Data\plugins
FirefoxExecutable=firefox.exe
AdditionalParameters=
LocalHomepage=
WaitForFirefox=false
DisableSplashScreen=false
AllowMultipleInstances=false
DisableIntelligentStart=false
SkipCompregFix=false
RunLocally=false
Of course, you don't need to change any settings except ProfileDirectory... you can leave everything else alone.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
That won't work. As is explained in Other\Source\Readme.txt, it must be a subdirectory - the directory of FirefoxPortable.exe is prepended to it, so you'd end up with
C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Desktop\FF Portable\C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\MyFFProfilewhich is clearly not what you want.There is no way this can be done without changing things in the launcher itself and recompiling it.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Shoot...
Wait - what about a shortcut folder?
Something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Desktop\FF Portable\Profile is a shortcut, pointing to C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\FFProfile
idk exactly how NSIS would react to that, but it might go off OK... definitely a bit hackish though. hmm...
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
Mentioning that just put me onto an idea. You can use a junction for C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Desktop\FirefoxPortable\Data\settings to C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\FFProfile. Being XP though you'll need to download a tool to create the junction point (Vista includes
mklinkwhich does it). I've never tried using a Junction with PortableApps.com applications, but so long as they're not moving things about (and Firefox doesn't) it should work. Do bear in mind that it's unsupported, though. I have successfully used a junction locally, so I get the same Gmail offline support with Google Gears in both Firefox and Chrome (they use different locations, so I turned the Firefox one into a junction to the Chrome one and now Google Gears data is shared between the two browsers; very useful).I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
Didn't John say that Junctions and Firefox Portable Profiles don't work together?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
That thread did come to mind when I was considering junctions, but that's different; that's for $APPDATA, where a directory was removed, this is for something else, just a path Firefox is being given being a junction. It should work.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
there is a directive you can add to the profile.ini...
Something like:
IsRelative = No
I may not understand your situation. Can you install portable ff to one of these locations:
- C:\
- C:\Program Files\
Then move your profile to My Documents.
You could just download the .zip download for Firefox, extract to the desktop and run Firefox with the -profile switch as you don't need a portable launcher.
Ignore silly users that PM you on IRC. What? You're one of them?
does more than just making it easier to use a custom profile.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
The profile path here will be static, that is, it won't change. Besides, for multiple instances, you could use the -no-remote switch.
Ignore silly users that PM you on IRC. What? You're one of them?