Private Browsing by PortableApps.com 3.0 has been released. Private Browsing by PortableApps.com is an enhanced privacy mode app that utilizes your existing copy of Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition. It has specialized settings, a flash blocker, a privacy-enhancing blocklist, improved separation from the local PC, a separate profile and a custom icon so you can easily distinguish it from your main Firefox Portable profile. It even has its own separate set of bookmarks. It's basically a more-advanced private browsing feature than those included in major browsers that can even be customized further by advanced users. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Platform. And it's open source and completely free.
Update automatically or install from the portable app store in the PortableApps.com Platform.
Features
Private Browsing by PortableApps.com is an app that works with Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition. It allows you to launch Firefox with a specialized profile with advanced privacy measures included. This profile has persistent cookies, history, download history and other privacy features off. Flashblock is included to block Flash Cookies and other nasties (if you decide to manually copy the Flash plugin to your profile). AdBlock Plus is included with a subscription to the EasyPrivacy list to block tracking scripts and sites. Local plugins and extensions are ignored and will not be used by this custom profile. A custom icon for the task bar is included so you can easily distinguish your private profile from your normal one.
PRIVACY NOTE: As with any network software, your network traffic is still viewable by network admins. This just lets you avoid having local tracks on the PC or on your portable device and helps you avoid some internet and advertising tracking.
PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format
Private Browsing by PortableApps.com is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.
Download
Private Browsing by PortableApps.com is available for immediate download from the Private Browsing by PortableApps.com homepage. Get it today!
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Comments
Won't recognize Firefox ESR
Change the detection so that it also detects ESR versions of Firefox Portable.
It gave an error message that it could not locate ....\FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe
When I changed the FirefoxPortableESR directory by dropping the ESR, it worked, but I'd prefer to retain the ESR in case I have both sometime, and since that is Portable Apps convention.
Not Supported
I'm sorry, but Firefox ESR is not supported by Private Browsing by PortableApps.com. It's intended only for the stable, general-public version of Firefox.
Re: Not Supported
To my mind, when I hear the words Extended Support, I think of stability.
I know the non-ESR versions are stable, since you could get nightly builds if you really wanted to go bleeding-edge.
ESR
ESR is intended for organizations (companies, universities) that need to standardize on a specific feature-set that won't change for a few months due to things like corporate apps and long testing periods for compatibility. They're not really intended for regular end users. We provide them primarily so extension and website developers can test for these environments.
Some people think they want ESR so they don't have to update as often but the ESR builds are updated just as often as the stable branch (every 6 weeks). ESR just gets the bug fixes while stable gets the improvements. ESR isn't any more stable than standard Firefox in usage, it's just a slightly more stable feature-set. Google Chrome updates as often as regular Firefox and has no ESR equivalent. Opera will be adopting the fast release cycle of Google Chrome beginning with version 15 (since Opera is switching to the Blink webkit fork) as well. Firefox ESR is really just for corporations as an alternative to IE (hence the slower updates to the base rendering engine).
In the end, we don't recommend Firefox Portable ESR for regular end users and don't support it for them. Our additional tools like Private Browsing, Secondary Profiles, etc aren't built or tested for ESR.