I've done my best to follow the directions in Portable Support *to the letter*, over several versions of Portable FF. Nevertheless, I continue to lack the presence of around 16 Add-Ons (Extensions), long-installed to the Profile I have cloned for use by the portable version. These extensions are kind of "make it or break it" to my daily use of FireFox. (It would be so much easier if there was some way to just point to an established Profile -- like with a Config setting -- and have Portable FF obey that.)
My Bookmarks are equally essential. The ONLY reason I have access to them is that I explicitly added a bookmark to Portable FF's bookmarks that calls the previous Bookmarks file.
On the other hand, the Plugins from my older, installed FF 3.6x seem to be present . . . so I guess my efforts were not a complete failure.
I am very displeased with this "new FF version every 3 weeks" crap, and really dislike the UI changes ever since 3.6, so I think I will need to "retrofit" FF along the lines of some articles I've found online. But if I can't bring those extensions onboard, it won't be looking good for my use of Portable FF at all -- or maybe for *any* FireFox.
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If you clone a profile from one location to another, some extensions will break regardless of whether it is a local or a portable version of Firefox. Firefox Portable, once your extensions are installed and running, will portablize them as you move around, even when you change folders.
Disabled extensions that are incompatible will not work. There are ways you can try to force them to work, but that can destabilize Firefox and are better covered elsewhere online (the same extensions you can use with local Firefox, you can use with portable to attempt to force/hack extension compatibility).
Discussions of UI are nothing to do with us, we just make it portable. Complaining about it here is the equivalent of complaining about it on your front porch. ... to your mailbox.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I had no idea how fragile the Profiles were, and how difficult to "clone" / relocate them in such a way as to keep most everything working. But thanks to the help provided here and some good old-fashioned trial & error I did manage to retrieve the Extensions-etc. functionality I had with 3.6 in Portable v. 12. Using tips from a few online articles, I also got the UI back to about 80% of the way I preferred it, which I find acceptable. But now, of course, v. 13 is out, with v. 14 just around the corner. So, I may have to retrace a bunch of these steps . . . ?
Yes, I'd like to see a portable-ized FF Enterprise edition, as GlenAllen mentioned, with a much longer-term status. I don't mind bugfixes, if they come to us the way they did through xx.28 sub-versions of 3.6. It's this "let's redesign the whole thing from scratch" business (for whatever reasons the developers may cite) that very quickly gets to be a drag. As many others have stated, 'if we wanted Google Chrome, we'd be using Google Chrome.'
I just update over the existing install -- haven't had a problem with any add-ons yet. On the other hand, I sometimes just want to start fresh, so--obviously--no problem there either; it only takes a few minutes to install the add-ons I use.
I'm no fan of Rapid Release either, so I feel no particular need to update the version I use (for "production") just because there's a new version out. FWIW, I expect John will offer the "enterprise" version as a portable edition once it becomes available--you'll get a much longer interval between "updates".
The ESR (Extended Support Release) for both Firefox and Thunderbird Portable are releasing now, but they are updated just as often as regular firefox is for security and bug fixes. The ONLY difference with ESR is that it will not get the new features and functionality that the mainline Firefox does. It is intended for corporations, universities, etc that need to peg internal web apps to specific browser versions.
As a comparison, anyone who has been using Firefox 3.6.x for the last year has had to update almost exactly the same number of times as someone on the latest version. Because there have been 28 bugfix releases to Firefox 3.6 in that same timeframe (which is why the now-dead version was 3.6.28). Firefox ESR will not save you updating. It will just have you stick with a specific set of features for about a year.
A common mistake is that people think the switch to rapid release means more updates. It doesn't. It means introducing new features more frequently. So an update that would normally be a .0.1 with just a few fixes now becomes a new .0 with new features as well. That's it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
sorry for failing to sufficiently differentiate between "updating" a [currently installed] release versus "updating" to a new release. One is, essentially, a maintenance release while the other is a new install (even if it's "over top" an existing install). I know of at least several people who have stuck with 3.6 primarily because they're annoyed with Rapid Release; they don't care about new "features" (of little or no value to them).
Well, hopefully they will upgrade now that Firefox 3.6 is dead. As 14 critical bugs were fixed in 12.0 and 11 of those were also fixed in 10.0.4 this week, I'm wondering how many of them exist in 3.6 and will never be fixed. Thankfully, Mozilla seems likely to force upgrade 3.6 users next month.
12.0 also introduced the first part of silent updates. Going forward, local installs won't need a UAC prompt to do an upgrade. Firefox will still be installed in Program Files making it more secure than Google Chrome which installs to USERPROFILE but will use a service to handle the upgrade. 13.0 will likely be completely silent updates ala Chrome. Though hopefully they will stick to the every 6 weeks schedule (with the occasional bugfix in between) and not the insanely frequent updates (sometimes multiple per week) that Chrome does.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!