Balooning FF3 mystery 10 megs

I really can't comment on the whole zipping thing, but to the general i will speak.

A clean install of FF3/FFP3 has not yet downloaded the malware filter database.
When fully downloaded it is about 52MBs, so the size of FF3 will increase by that amount. My guess is that when you zip it is responsible for most of the 10-35 megs difference.

see here:
Disable Anti-Phishing [it should be called Disable Anti-Phishing/Anti-Malware]
https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#performance

These features are turned on by default so unless your security preferences have been changed, you are likely already using them. Phishing and Malware Protection options can be found on the Security Preferences pane. Go to Tools > Options… > Security

If you disable one or both of the features you will improve the speed and size of FF/FFP 3, but you will of course lose the value of those features, the decision is yours.

As a side note, i just zipped the database and it went from 52MB to 15MB, that falls within your parameters.

Tim

when FFP is first downloaded most of the information is in the App\DefaultData folder and even in that there is the bare minimum. When FFP is first run it will create the Data\profile folder and the data\plugins folder. Within the profile folder there will be a lot of info stored (cookies, bookmarks,history) which was not there when u downloaded the file initially. With all of this added the size will increase a lot.