When I move the portable firefox directory to a new location, after restarting Firefox, the addons icons menu bar has gone.
I can still access the addons through the Tools>Extensions menu and see that they are still installed. However, I cannot access the options for them that way.
Is there a file where the location of extensions/addon icons or shortcuts is stored that is maybe not getting rewritten when I transfer the portable firefox directory to another location or usb drive?
Many thanks.
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I just had to deal with this myself.
Assuming you have the portable firefox located in "C:\Mozilla Firefox - Portable", then in the file "\Data\profile\extensions.json", for each extension, there will be an entry similar to the following:
"rootURI":"jar:file:///C:/Mozilla%20Firefox%20-%20Portable/App/firefox64/browser/features/xxxxxxxx@mozilla.org.xpi!/"
Note that for the path:
1. "\" characters are replaced with "/".
2. Spaces are replaced with "%20".
Therefore, you can find the old path by looking for the first "rootURI" entry, and then replace it with the new path which you'll need to reformat using the above rules.
A simple Search/Replace All will fix the issue.
The Firefox portable loaders should be modified to check this upon startup and automate the search/replace if there is a path discrepancy.
Until then, we'll have to do it by hand - or write our own script to make it easier.
I pushed a potential fix in Firefox Portable 66.0.5 that I think should resolve this. Please double check on your install and let me know.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
My install came from the Firefox Developer Edition Portable v67. So if your fix was there, then it's not complete.
As a followup, however, I discovered that the changes in extensions.json aren't always enough. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, so there's something else going on.
And sometimes Firefox Developer Portable fixes itself and sometimes it doesn't.
If you figure out what this is and fix the loader, I would appreciate it if you would release one for v67 (Dev edition) - as v68 is very buggy and I'm staying with v67 for now.
Also, if you know what else needs to be changed and it can be done at the user level (albeit manually), I'd appreciate a heads up if it's going to be a while before a fixed loader is released. That way, I can at least manage it manually for now.
You're welcome to grab the launcher from this and use it in Dev. The splash will be wrong is all. We don't do updates to Dev between releases. Use the auto-updater. And note that it's specifically a Beta quality release so will have bugs.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
That's good to know.
However, does the launcher from Dev v67 have the fix you mentioned? If so, then there's no point in doing that at the moment.
It doesn't. You can download the latest Firefox Portable Stable or ESR and the launcher has the potential fix in it. You can install them and copy the launcher over or use 7-Zip to extract the launcher out. There's nothing between the last two devs and this launcher that the installer needs to take care of in an upgrade.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Hi,
I'm on FF Portable 67.0.1 and the problem persists: Whenever I use another computer with another drive letter for my thumb drive, certain addons such as NoScript don't work anymore (I have to disable/enable them in the addons menu), I also lose my file associations.
Is there any fix?
Thanks in advance!
This is a specific fix for the bug mentioned above, icons in the addons menu are lost when moving machines. If extensions are fully breaking that's a separate issue.
UPDATE: I determined the issue and have a partial workaround implemented for release as well as a path towards a full fix detailed in this bug here: https://portableapps.com/node/60496
File associations within Firefox itself have never been supported. Details on what you can do to achieve the same are discussed here: https://portableapps.com/node/60315
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
John, I'm reaching out to you for your input. This is also an issue for Tor Browser: see at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27604 . In comment 12, I've noted your situation as well, if you would like to elaborate what you did for this fix (and also the 60315 issue). But also to let you know that Tor Project may get something upstreamed at Firefox. TIA
I already portablize extensions.json by having the launcher track the last run location and the current one and updating the paths within on each run. So that enables all the extension settings to work already. The FirefoxPortable.exe launcher does that for a bunch of stuff. The issue is that the other lz4 file was added in 67.0 of Firefox and that uses an oddball compression decompression format that I can't quite seem to make work. I can decompress it with open source code and adjust the paths the same way I do for extensions.json and lots of other files, but I can't get it to compress into the expected format that Firefox needs to read. I think I'll have to delve into Firefox code to figure that out.
Side note: The Firefox Portable source is in FirefoxPortable\Other\Source and written in NSIS.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the quick reply. Not sure if Tor Browser would want persistent disk data for last run location, and I think they can come up with something more elegant/robust, given their relationship with Mozilla. And yes, the other lz4 file added in 67.0 needs addressing as well (when TB moves to ESR68). I'll pass on your reply. Many thanks.
If someone is running it from their external drive, it's just something like X:\PathToTorBrowser. Without it, the extensions.json can't be reliably adjusted. At least not easily. The launcher adjusts paths in this fashion within prefs.js, pluginreg.dat (less critical now that everything except Flash is dead), extensions.ini (for older versions of Firefox), extensions.sqlite, mimeTypes.rdf, extensions.json, and - eventually - addonStartup.json.lz4. Stuff breaks as you move Firefox around without those types of adjustments.
I've been adjusting paths in Firefox Portable for since 2004 when it first started needing it to fully work portably.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!