According to the firefox portable support page, firefox supports configuring mime types for other portable helper apps. It also says that firefox portable supports running from a cd.
While the portable helper apps configuration will work on writable media, it breaks once you run firefox on read-only media. Specifically, it breaks when you use the FirefoxPortable.ini file (as described in the firefox portable live directions).
What appears to be happening is that the helper app paths get changed to the temporary directory, rather than the portableapps path. It seems to assume that the helper apps have been copied there (?). This is strange, since most (if not all) portableapps will run fine from read-only media.
Perhaps this is a bug? Or perhaps some adjustments need to be made to the FirefoxPortable.ini file?
Incidentally, I was able to get firefox helper apps working on a cd through this workaround. However, this is a kludge-- I'd rather have it just work.
Thanks,
aaron
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this is a bug. I think it has been mentioned before here.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
Just not supported. You can't preconfigure FFP for mimetypes and redistribute it, anyway. (not permitted under license)
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Don't jump to conclusions. Where did he say anything about redistribution?
There are several cases where someone would want to run Firefox and PortableApps in general from read-only media:
Incidentally, I started looking at the FireFoxPortable launcher code. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard of a thing to fix.
The way the mime types magic works is that it makes a copy of the mimetypes.rdf file and modifies the helper app paths to be relative to the launcher. When RunLocally=true is set in FirefoxPortable.ini is set, the entire firefox folder is copied to temp. The mimetype magic is setting the paths to be relative to the *copied* firefox folder, hence the invalid paths.
However, there's no reason that the mimetype magic and runlocally couldn't cooperate. The helper app paths just have to be set relative to the location of the portableapps launcher, not the location of the copied firefox folder.
In pseudo-code, its currently working like this:
But it could be changed to work like this:
[Bump removed by moderator JTH]
I have fixed the issue and posted a patch in the bug tracker over on PortableApps' SourceForge site.