Hi,
I'll start off with a simple question: should Firefox portable use only its enclosing drive, not the computers main hard drive for everything it does?
If so, then my case: I have a situation, where I use FF-portable from an encrypted file. This encrypted file is mounted with TrueCrypt, an so becomes visible to the system as a regular system hard drive, lets say X. Everything works ok, and I can even have multiple of these encrypted portablefirefoxes running at the same time (when running each one with firefox's -no-remote startup parameter).
Now I have just run into a problem, where when I tried to update one such portableFirefox instance, the encrypted file an thus the virtual hard drive did not have enough space to do the reinstallation. This as such is no problem, as in my use updates are something to keep away from for other reasons. But, once the update process started, it seems that it uses the actual, local hard drive's (C:) filesystem for this, I'm seeing changes in
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\firefox\updates
Also, the next time I try to mount and launch any other "clean" version of firefoxportable, i.e. one that has not been updated, the update seems to trigger again in any case. When I delete the previously mentioned updates-folder on C:, this problem goes away. This leads me to think that FFportable does use the local windows-user's profile folders.
Is there a way to force FFportable to stick completely to its "own" folders, on a separate file system?
And this all happens on Windows 7 at least.
Thanks in advance
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When no-remote is used, all bets are off. Our launcher can't stick around and clean up afterwards. So, things will be left behind on every single machine. no-remote is not intended for production use and breaks URL handling in Firefox itself. no-remote should *only* be used portably on your own machine where you don't care that things will be left behind. no-remote + updating using Firefox's built in updater is completely untested and unsupported.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
When you say "update", do you mean you're using Firefox's internal updater? I believe that update process uses your local filesystem regardless of whether Firefox is locally installed or the portable edition. I always prefer to update by simply using a later paf.exe in order to avoid any such conflicts (though, in general, the internal updater doesn't cause any problems--it will normally clean up after itself). Lack of space, however, will always cause some kind of problem. FWIW, I do something similar to what you do, only I don't use TrueCrypt most of the time--only for a couple instances. Using -no-remote (AllowMultipleInstances) has never caused me any problems.