Strictly hypothetically speaking, if someone were to recompile Firefox without the logo and name, and thus not be bound by the restrictions on Portable Firefox, what direction would we hypothetically want this to go?
1. Updates would be disabled, as they interfere with an installed Firefox. (They could be manually enabled if someone wanted it so.)
2. Session restore and the phishing protection would be disabled, as well as cache and history. All would be able to be manually enabled, again, of course.
3. Some kind of proxy management extension would be included. Something to help you get online at school or work. Opera can read the values from Internet Explorer, but I haven't seen a Firefox extension that can do the same. That would be really helpful if the browser just detected IE's LAN settings and applied them.
4. A clever name. PortableApps doesn't have a cute mascot to base anything off of, so my line of thinking led me to the packrat, since USB sticks are getting bigger and cheaper. So you can pack more junk around. Wiki says "packrat" refers to a couple dozen species under genus neotoma, but something like, say, Neorat, doesn't hold much appeal, though the Neo- prefix is clearly marketable (see: The Matrix trilogy). Neoflash: The Browser for Flash Drives? I dunno.
5. Some kind of user-defined censor. You try to go to a naughty site (or something as innocent as xbox.com) and you get a warning from the server saying the company/school doesn't approve of that site. Well, some would think to use a proxy to go around, but you really don't want to go that way if you want to stay legit. I'm thinking about a sort of censor which recognizes the no-no page, detects what link triggered it, and offers to add it to a list. Links pointing to sites on the list get "broken" (you can't click on the link). Maybe this add-on would have zones, for example you put it in the work zone at work (maybe it sees what proxy it's on and chooses that way). And you could right-click a broken link to try anyway. I don't know if IT departments log these requests, but I would if I were them. So it would be nice to not trigger them in the first place.
Who would hypothetically use this? People on flash drives, mainly. And people at work/school, since it would be geared towards computers that you don't own and might not trust. Who wouldn't? Anybody using a hard drive and/or trusted computers.
Now I'm just wondering, how hard is it to hypothetically compile Firefox from the source? Can it be done with free software? And how hard is it to customize it, like what Blackbird and Orca do?
Speaking completely honestly, however, I'm just curious. It's an idea. While I might make one custom build of the current Firefox at the time to see if I can do it and learn from it, I don't think I have the time or resources to commit to a full project. But I won't rule it out either - it might be really easy.
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#1 and #2:
I'm not sure why it would be so hard to negotiate with FF so that these settings could START disabled.
#3:
While there may not be an extension that does exactly that, I don't think writing into the code of FF is the best approach. It would be better to develop an extension that does what you want, and publish it to the Mozilla site for everyone to see.
#4 No real opinion
#5 Are you suggesting a content filter that somehow pulls settings from whatever content filter may be on the network you are working on? That sounds difficult.
I dunno, I like the concept of plugins and addons, to add or modify the functionality of an app without having to recompile the whole thing.
It also sounds like managing a whole branch of FF might take more resources than we have.
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
Me either, but JTH has said on various occasions that he had to work with Mozilla on what could be changed, and that certain things that might help the portable version couldn't be changed. These were one such example.
I'm not talking about writing into the code of Firefox, but rather a fork of Firefox that's optimized for flash drives. Still, I agree, it would be better to be an extension - and then the extension be bundled with the package. It could be disabled or uninstalled even, if the user wanted to, but it seems to me that the best use of Firefox on a flash drive is to use it at work/school where IE is the only choice and you're not allowed to install stuff. On a friend's computer you can just install Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or whatever. If they don't already have them. Because friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer. Anyway, it would actually be best, I think, to get up with a current proxy developer who is interested in trying new things and add to their extension. I like QuickProxy for this, but they aren't compatible with Fx 3.5 yet.
Something like that, but not exactly. You wouldn't be able to pull the settings right from the filter, I wouldn't think, without admin access to the server running it. I wouldn't even consider testing that. Besides, the filter's "turn back now" page doesn't have any kind of branding, except the company I work for. It could even be a custom job. I could whip something up using the HOSTS file that does the exact same thing, but it would be easily defeated if the user can edit the HOSTS file. (Just redirect all naughty sites you know of (or from a list) to a local page.)
No, I'm talking about the extension seeing that the request for an Internet site was redirected to an Intranet page, recognizing this "error" for what it really is, and helping the end user not click on links previously noted to be bad.
But I'm not a programmer, I don't know just how hard that would be.
Oh, I didn't mean to suggest the PA.c team do it. Hypothetically, I'd do it. I've actually done something kinda similar before. One of my favorite games keeps a big chunk of its code in a 5MB container, and this container can be unpacked, the files altered (say you want a gun with a bigger clip, you want to be able to carry more bullets, or maybe you want to be able to put a silencer on shotguns, or shoot underwater), and then you can recompile to the container format it uses (.u - Unreal Engine). I figure Firefox will be a little tougher, but something like that, once you get all the motions down, it's pretty easy.
The only thing is, and I never got this with my other project... a new version comes out, and I'd have to do all the work all over again. I'd made edits to over 30 files, and I didn't remember all the changes I'd made, not exactly. So I'd have to go make all the changes all over again. Then I'd test it, and find out I missed something... There's gotta be a tool, some kind of editor that sees what change you made to a file, and then remembers that change next time you open a vanilla copy of the file, and automatically does it for you, or has you confirm each change, so you can check it's done right, or something like that. Got to be.
Of course, I'm not promising anything... I'm just talking, and hypothetically at that.