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Firefox Portable 2.0 Pre-Release 1 (Testers Needed)

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John T. Haller
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Firefox Portable 2.0 Pre-Release 1 (Testers Needed)

I've just posted a pre-release of Firefox Portable 2.0. This release has many of the same features of Firefox Portable 2.0 RC3. There are a couple additions:

License Agreement Added - The Mozilla Firefox 2.0 end user license agreement is now displayed on first run.

Vista Compatibility - Both the launcher and the installer are now compatible with Windows Vista and should install and run even on a Guest-level account.

As for testing, I'd like to get some folks testing out the license agreement when using an INI as well as when running from CD as I haven't put it through as thorough testing in these scenarios.

Download Firefox Portable 2.0 Pre-Release 1

I'm still debating adding in a prompt on first run on whether to enable session saving. On some slower drives, it slows down Firefox quite a bit. Any thoughts on this are welcome as well.

Regards,
John

rich.bradshaw
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Great!

Installed over my old version, everything seems fine. Does seem slightly slower, but I think its just me - I installed over RC3, so I doubt there are really any performance issues.

Well done John, keep up the hard work!

Simeon
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Cool!

Without a prompt, session saving would be disabled, right?
I dont want this feature anyway, but I would add a prompt for enabling session saving if it isnt too much work. With a prompt, its up to each user to choose the way he wants it.
Right now, I'm sitting infront of some pretty old Mac which doesn't allow me to test it right away but in a couple of hours I'll check FFP2Pre1's Wine-ability.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

BvF7734
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...

I agree with the thought of allowing the user to decide if they would like this option. I personially will not wish to use the session saver so I personally will disable it. There are others out there though that may wish to have that feature.

A suggestion though about the session saver and CD's... Would it be to hard to add a line or string or what have you that would sense if it is on a writable partition or not and auto turn on and off that feature if they have it enabled? I forsee this being an issue for some people who end up running this from CD (like myself at times) that may have that feature enabled (obvioulsy not me). Would it just error out? Trying to think of a useful addition to the launcher that may help. I kow nothing about coding so I do not know if or how hard that would be to add.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do or say will be exaggerated or mis-quoted and used against you.

wsm23
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On the session saving issue.

I vote for a prompt.

In the mean time...

Easy instructions: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore

This takes care of the tabs and session restore feature at the same time.

BTW installed over your FFP RC3 and worked flawlessly.

EDIT(11/15/2006 16:17 EST)- The license popped up and worked great. And *ahem* of course I read the license *ahem*.

You might want to include instructions about the in place upgrades with regard replacing files. The installer you have made allows you to say "yes to all" when overwriting the previous version. I wasn't sure about it but found out I was OK afterwards.

8)
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Live today like it is your last!

Do you do the right thing even when no one will know you did?

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mosquito
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session restore

Well a prompt would be fine, but is this only for session restore or a complete disable of session restore and all the sub-keys (ex. resume_from_crash) (-> concerning the life span of the usb drive)?

Maybe yes, I am at the moment not very familiar with this new feature, but I know I hate it on my desktop PC with FF2.

philbar
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What is

What is "\Data\profile\urlclassifier2.sqlite"?

It is 4.48 MB on my computer thats nearly 25% of all the space it takes to ran Firefox Portable.

John T. Haller
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Phishing

That's FF 2.0's anti-phishing system. Head to Tools - Options - Security. You can uncheck "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery" and it might disable downloading of that file. I'm not sure, though.

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philbar
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Awesome ...you should think

Awesome

...you should think about possibly auto-disabling this or using a prompt because it is quite the space hog for a portable app and once it's enabled you need to manually delete the file to save space.

wsm23
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Can I delete the following files safely?

John,
Can I delete the following files safely if I do not want the session saver feature and have disabled it?

\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\urlclassifier2.sqlite 9.1mb
\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\urlclassifier.sqlite 3.6mb
\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\sessionstore (jscript file)
\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\session.rdf

8)
Life is about the journey not the destination!
Live today like it is your last!

Do you do the right thing even when no one will know you did?

\(^.^)/

Life is about the journey not the destination!

The Kazoo Spartan

John T. Haller
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Disable antiphish

You should disable antiphishing, too (see other post in this thread)

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

wsm23
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Done.

Disabled and deleted.

Thanks.

FF restores urlclassifier2.sqlite on start up, but now it is 0kb.

8)
Life is about the journey not the destination!
Live today like it is your last!

Do you do the right thing even when no one will know you did?

\(^.^)/

Life is about the journey not the destination!

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works with wine!

it works with wine like it should. But the first time I ran it, wine (or firefox) crashed; it just disappeared from my screen. The second (and third) time, everything was normal.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

John T. Haller
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Did you see the license?

Did you see the license and were you able to agree to it? That's really the only thing that's different now.

Also, what version of Wine do you have? I'm not sure why, but some versions of Wine are buggy and copying multiple files fails (which is why I have some stuff coded to copy individual files). Also, once it does launch, do you see the PortableApps.com bookmarks and Live bookmark?

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Simeon
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I saw it .

I saw the license and I was able to agree to it. The crash came afterwards.

Im not at home right now but I can't tell about my wine-version but I think its the latest one.

The live bookmark and the PortableApps.com bookmark were working the way they should.

I will check my wine-version this evening and post it.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

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Wine

my wine is 0.9.24-12.1 on SuSE 10.1.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

John T. Haller
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I'm thinking it wasn't a crash

But the process that updates the license file gets run from inside FirefoxPortable.exe, updates an INI and then closes. FFP.exe checks that to see if the license was agreed to and then exits. I'm guessing there's a delay in Wine preventing this. I'll look into it.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

youngheart80
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Every thing looking good

Every thing looking good here. Installed over FF 2.0RC3 and had no problems getting it to come up. License came up and answered with no problems. Love these apps! Thanks John. You da man!

arqbrulo
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Working so far

Installed it without any problems. one of my themes was out-dated so I updated it. Also, I'm 99% sure that Minimize-to-tray extension was activated with middle-click, but now it's right-click. Other than those two, everything is working like it's supposed to.

Am I supposed to have the PortableApps.com bookmark? 'cause I don't.
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Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
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John T. Haller
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Depends

If you already had a profile of your own, then no. It's in the default portable profile, though.

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linuxx
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Prompt

I'm not sure why session saving would need a prompt more than any other option in FF. I'll be happy either way. Smile

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This one's different

Session saving writes to the drive every time you open a tab, window, or navigate to a new page. Not a good thing to have on a flash drive. And unlike many FF options, this one can't be shut off in any menu. You need to actually know how to work with about:config to change it, and know exactly what changes to make, which most users won't.

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Localization

I wonder if I am a bit early to enter localization as a topic.

I have just installed 2.0 P-R1 on top of my German 1.5.

It wasn't to be expected that 2.0 would accept the 1.5 lang-package, so it got disabled and I deinstalled it. From ftp.mozilla.org I retrieved the appropriate de.xpi and installed that (without the locale-switcher). No problem so far: no complaints during the installation, and the language pack displays its presence in the Add-ons dialogue.

But, after restart of Firefox Portable I still have all the english menues. I have also tried

  • de- and reinstallation of the lang-pack
  • logging of and on
  • installing Pre-Release in a fresh directory

all with the same result.

After all this I have done another fresh install of the Pre-Release and done the localization just as described under
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/localization
method 2, installed the locale-switcher extension (2.0) first, then the lang-pack (restarts included). At first nothing much seemed to happen: when setting language to German the menus remained as before, only the description of "English (United States)" switched to "English (Vereinigte Staaten)". Another restart fixed that.

In Firefox Portable 1.5 I have been able to localize by just adding the lang-pack, so I have tried that here as well. But in 2.0 the use of the locale-switcher seems compulsory (correct me if I'm wrong). To wrap it up, localization seems to be working fine if you do it by the book.

Baschti
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german ff

on german, is faster for me and should be only interesting for german users Smile

lad dir doch einfach die ganz normale deutsche firefox version von mozilla direkt runter, und ersetze den app\firefox\ ordner mit dem firefox ordner, der 2.0

bzw es müsste das chrome verzeichniss reichen, und alles ist ganz normal auf deutsch...

Apps on my Portable Device:
Miranda, Firefox, Sunbird, Thunderbird, 7-Zip, FileZilla, GIMP, OOo, Sodoku and VLC

German User, Sorry for my bad english, I do my really really best Smile

christian.kissing
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international ff

Let's stick to English, since this is an international forum, and no, this is not only interesting for German users. Count the number of available languages yourself.

Sometimes quick and dirty approaches don't do either. In the instructions on localization re. ver. 1.5 (cf. link in my original posting) the PortableApps-guys state two methods. You preferred #1, but #2 has been described as "a bit cleaner". So I have tried it earlier for Firefox Portable 1.5 without installing the locale-switcher, and that worked just fine for me. Now I have tried to simply repeat this on 2.0 using the 2.0 lang-pack - and failed.

I have tried the by-the-book-approach next and succeeded, and, since we're in beta-testing land here, tried to communicate my experience to the community and to the developers.

As far as I understand, PortableApps are generally compiled using options that optimize for PortableApp-ing (e.g. compression, write-access). That and the somewhat standardized layout of directory structure I didn't want to lose by brushing a local installation over Firefox Portable. That's why I preferred the somewhat 'cleaner' method of applying localization, and maybe some other users will want to use it, too.

Intended message to the developers was: Yes, localization, method 2, works as described for earlier versions, but it seems to depend on the locale-switcher and you may want to add a hint that it does. - And I am sure they have read the intended message correctly the first time.

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I have downloaded and been

I have downloaded and been using this beta version since it has came out and it has been working great, it might be me but I think that this version launches and runs smoother than the rc3 ver.

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FF 2 need lang-pack for FF 2 !!

I localized the FF 2 to German.
I have learnt, that the FF 2 needs the special lang-packs for FF 2 (as well as the "switcher" for FF 2). Both worked very well; the old "switcher" and the "old" lang-pack FF 1.5 don#t work.

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Firefox 2.0 Portable Is The BEST Yet!!

FF2 Portable is even better then my U3 version of FF 1.5!!
After I downloaded it it worked fine, No Problems with it, it works great.

P.S. When will the U3 version of FF2 Portable come out?... Smile

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No Problems

I downloaded and extracted to hard drive yesterday, no problems.
I copied my profile over from 1.5.0.8 , no problems.
Was offered the license at first launch, accepted, no problems.
---(Must admit I did not read it!)
Was warned about old extentions, no problems.
Disabled System Restore in about:config , no problems.
Allowed Antiphising, no problems, but think I will disable this.

I think a prompt to disable System Restore would be a good idea.

Tim
Geek w/o portfolio

Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?

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I agree... get rid of the

I agree...
get rid of the system restore with a prompt...

arqbrulo
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Disable Session Saver

All this talk about disabling session saver is recommended, but only on flash drives right? Someone who is using other non-flash-type portable devices does not need to disable this right?
---------------
Teen1: Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool.
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: I don't even know anymore.

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -- Robert Frost
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: baby ain't mine." -- Adam Holguin

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True

I actually disable it in my local version as well, to simplify profile syncs. I use the session saver in Tab Mix Plus instead, since I'm using the extension anyway. Session saving causes no problems on a HDD.

maikelsteneker
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prompt

A prompt would be the best. If you decide not to prompt, then please disable it!

For a portable app it's quite pointless...

peter_g
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History in FF ?

Well, I don't know if that is relevant:

I was used that the history of the websites I have visited, was saved.
Whenever I have pulled down the arrow at the end of the line where the URL can be written in (sorry, I am Austrian, I don't know the English word for that part of the menu), all URL I have visited so far where saved in an kind of history.
That still happens as long the FF 2 is running.

But if the FF 2 was shut down and started again, that history is disappeared ..... Well, with the portable FF 1.5 that history remained after shutting down (and starting again).

So, is that a kind of "wrong-user-error", what means, I haven't found the point in the menu-tree where I can activate the function again .... ?
Or is it a kind of bug ?
Or was it an idea of the developers to delete that function ?

However, that fact is very annoying to me.

John T. Haller
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It's disabled

History has been disabled by default in Firefox Portable since before version 1.0 to save wear and tear on flash drives and increase performance. As usual, you can re-enable it within Tools - Options.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

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Doesn't completely shut down

Running WinXP Home.

Originally, I installed PR1 over my RC3 install. RC3 worked but I hadn't done much with it, preferring to stay with 1.5.0.7. There seemed to be some glitches (including it rejected all but 2 of my extensions), so I deleted all of the PR1/RC3 mishmash and new installed PR1.

The main issue now is that it doesn't shut down. I can select File, Exit or the big red X, it doesn't matter. Oh, the program disappears from the screen ... but ... when I try to restart, Windows says "there is already an instance running ..." and when I look at Process Explorer, sure enough, there is a FireFox running. I have to kill that to restart FireFox.

Any idea whassup?

Oh, I tried your minesweeper. I've always been mystified that MineSweeper had no sound. Neither does yours. I remain mystified.

OOO 2.04 appears no different from 2.03 in Impress. Maybe a little faster. Lots of people complaining on OOO Users that 2.04 won't install. At least we don't have that problem.

Haven't had time to try GAIM or SciTE yet.

-----Paul-----

zikarus
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Sure that you waited for

Sure that you waited for some 10-20 seconds with the restart after shutting down? Then there should be no problem...

pwright2
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Yes, I waited.

However, this morning the problem seems to have disappeared. Darned if I know.

RussSmith
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Works flawlessly for me

I've been using RC3 since the day it was released and it's worked flawlessly. I'm using Pre-Release 1 now and it's also working without issues. The program is stored on a Memory Stick and I routinely use it on two different machines with built-in Memory Stick readers. I did have to reset one machine once due to a problem with another program. When I restarted FireFox, it gave me the option of restoring my previous session. That also worked flawlessly. (It would appear then, that session restore is on by default, rather than off.)

DougBaer
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Works great

I use this daily and haven't had any problems -- installed over the RC3 version

ag0044
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Simple!

Installation over RC3 went smoothly ("Yes to all"). Said that "I agree", and here we are.

Compared to running FF2 from local HDD, a little slow to start (to be expected) but then no apparent difference in "everyday" usage on home PC.

(I wish all installs of new[-er] software were as easy!)

george1968
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Using a USB drive.

Using a USB drive. Just upgraded, got the agreement on first start. I must be doing something wrong since it didn't install over RC3 and it seems to be working for others. What's the secret? Copied profile and plug-ins and everything seems to have been picked up and is working ok so far. As far as session saving goes, I don't see the need on a portable drive, but there should at least be a prompt to turn it on or off. EDIT - RC1 seems a little faster.

mosquito
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session saving

I now have installed the Pre-Release 1 of FFP 2.0.

I have read, that you think about a prompt for session saving at first start of FFP 2.0. I thought that for now session saving is disabled. But when I go to about:config I found no keys "browser.sessionstore. ...".

That means the session saving for now is not disabled!

Or do I miss something?

Thanks
mosquito

christian.kissing
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session saving on by default

Hi,

take a look at: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore
(link thanks to wsm23, see way above in this forum)

You have to insert the "browser.sessionstore.enable" key manually and set it to "false" otherwise it's on.

As someone mentioned earlier, this is one of the settings you don't find any dialogue-setting for, and info is 'hidden' in the knowledge base.

mosquito
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strange thing

Hi

I have done it prior to my question. In the KB and you say, if the key is not there, it's on. To turn it off the key has to be set to false. But when I go to about:config, there is no key "browser.sessionstore.enable" or "browser.sessionstore.resume" or "browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash" or "browser.sessionstore.resume_session" or "browser.sessionstore.interval" and my sessions do not restore. The only thing I have set is in the options dialog "show blank page".

My question at John was, if session restore is set to false or not in the "Firefox Portable 2.0 Pre-Release 1", because I found no key and John was thinking of adding a prompt at first start of FFP. So I thought it now has to be off.

John T. Haller
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It's not

As mentioned many times in this thread, it is NOT disabled. I was considering doing it.

And if a key isn't there, you just create it.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Show
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Minor Bug with loading a new tab

Right, well i don't know if its already been identified but i found this earlier...
I'm using the Gmail Notifier and have it set to open in new tab - when i clicked it eariler it started to load in a new tab but when i clicked over to a preivously opened tab the Gmail page showed for a second or so in this tab before displaying what it should have done.

Don't quite know if thats phrased very well but i don't quite know how to put it - it was a bit of a wierd error.

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