I've only ever used Firefox Portable on admin accounts, but last week I tried it in a controlled environment, and the results were disappointing.
I was running Portable Firefox 3.6 (official build) on a flash drive on a laptop running Vista Home Premium SP2 through the computer's Guest account. Firefox was installed, and connects to the Net without a proxy, but is loaded down with tons of badware, strange toolbars and the like. Portable Firefox wouldn't connect to anything. Google, the start page (start.portableapps.com) or a couple other sites.
Any ideas? Maybe it's because it was the computer's guest account?
maybe its been hooked into a proxy. Who knows?
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world
No. The laptop accesses a cable modem via Wi-Fi. No proxy involved. I checked the LAN settings. They're the same in Portable Fx as the installed one. These settings are exactly how I am able to get online at work, I have to use the same proxy IE does. But that's work and not at all related to the situation I'm talking about except I know how to get Portable Fx on a proxy and that's not this.
Oh, the Persona loaded, but maybe it's locally cached? This is 3.6 which handles them differently than 3.5.x. I still have the Personas extension but internally it treats them like themes, so caching is a good possibility.
When I go to a Vista computer my brother set up, I'm short on rights.
Every time I first fire up FirefoxPortable, it takes a long time, and it insists on installing the Yahoo toolbar and AVG toolbar. It also fails to load some of my standard addons.
I pull down the addons box, uninstall/disable the offending ones, search for updates for all items, and then let it restart Firefox.
It restarts right away, and everything is back to normal (at least what "normal" means to me).
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
None of mine were disabled, but none of mine interfere with the connection.
Something involving printing showed up. They have a wireless printer (how cool is that?), maybe it was about that. But I'm not sure that would interfere with the access of one browser than the other. Or a browser loaded from one drive and not the other.
Might also be a firewall, I guess. Trying to remember what she had. I think she had a trial of some Norton suite that had expired. Came with her laptop.