howdy,
Do i absolutely need to install Mozilla Firefox on my pc hard drive to run/use MozFireFoxPortable from an external thumb drive ?
i've been trying to use MFFPortable for several days and am as confused as hell whether i'm in MozFF or MozFFPortable. most of the time i am certain i'm in the MozFF application and not using the portable
FFPortable says their product is sooooooooo easy to install; well it was "easy". they don't say it is easy to USE and SETUP with confidence, or to move the profile and favorites from MozFF to MozFFPortable
can i just install FFPortable on an external (thumb) drive as seems to be its purpose, without any parts of MozFireFox on the computer hard drive ?
nothing in life is easy and MFFPortable is NO (emphasis) exception
this is driving driving driving me crazy. Portable hardly seems worth the struggle after several days of pain
thnx, john
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A couple quick points to be sure we're on the same page.
A local Firefox install will have firefox.exe residing in Program Files and your data stored within your userprofile folder (usually C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox).
A portable Firefox install will consist of a folder called FirefoxPortable with firefox.exe residing in the App\Firefox folder and your data stored within Data\profile. The FirefoxPortable folder will also contain FirefoxPortable.exe, which is how you start Firefox portably.
The local one exists where it exists and can't be moved around. The portable one can be moved around anywhere you'd like: cloud, local, portable drive etc.
That's enough for most people and no further changes are necessary, as they then sync their bookmarks etc by using Firefox Sync and start Firefox Portable by running FirefoxPortable.exe.
If you're don't want to use Firefox Sync and are so inclined, you can copy your Firefox local profile into portable Firefox by following these directions: https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#local_profile
There are 3 notes about the above:
1. A local and portable copy of Firefox can't run at the same time, so if you start a local one with a portable copy running, it will just open a new window of the portable one. (Note: There is an option to allow multiple instances, but it is messy and not recommended)
2. The portable version can't run from Program Files. Windows' security model prevents it from being able to use its data.
3. If you run firefox.exe within Firefox Portable directly, it'll start as a local copy of Firefox, using the data stored on the local PC or creating a new set of data there if none exists. It will do this if you manually set the copy of Firefox within Firefox Portable as your default browser within Firefox's options (it's purposely set not to check or offer to do this).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!