Let's say I'm trying to download a web page (complete) from The Wall Street Journal with both stock Mozilla Firefox Quantum current (57.0.4) and the PortableApps.com version. Arrive through Twitter, get through the paywall; here's your free WS article: https://twitter.com/GaryPR7/status/950014058404564993
Trying to download the above article produces the results I've just described. Success with stock Firefox, failure with portable Firefox. No add-ons, everything is set to default.
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You likely need to enable the cache to get this working properly. That's the only functional difference out of the box.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
So if I understand correctly, Firefox downloaded from mozilla.com and Firefox downloaded from portableapps.com indeed work differently with the same (default features). Which might be the case. As I'm playing with the various portable browsers, Chrome variations indeed grow their Data directories over time while Firefox Portable doesn't. That's a difference in behavior of at least portable Chrome and Firefox.
You likely need to enable the cache to get this working properly.
I Googled this. It may be something not so trivial as I haven't found a trivial answer to it. Or is it something too trivial and I'm missing the point?
So the bottom line is, you go to mozilla.com, download Firefox, it works in one way, you go to portableapps.com, download Firefox, it works in another way. And there is no indication whatsoever on the Firefox Portable page (https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable) that I should expect a different behavior than from the Firefox downloaded from mozilla.com.
OK, this may be your engineering choice to offer Firefox Portable with different defaults than mozilla.com Firefox, but how about a fair warning on the page than notifying users of this fact? And also adding instructions on how to achieve the same behavior of portable Firefox as Mozilla Firefox has? That would help, because now the two work differently with no warning sign of the fact whatsoever while users may reasonably assume the exact same behavior. All in all, it's odd. Or is it just me?
Thanks for considering this, and your work, by the way!
The information is here on PortableApps, you just have to follow the link Copying local settings, Second profiles, Plugins, Helper apps, ESR schedule, and more....
I agree that it isn't exactly intuitive that a list of our changes would be found by following that link based on it's description.
Just enable the cache and it will work the same. All Firefox features and extensions are supposed to work with cache disabled. If one doesn't, you'll need to inform the publisher.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!