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Firefox Portable 52 ESR isn't launching

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A. B.
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Firefox Portable 52 ESR isn't launching

I tried to install Firefox 52 ESR Portable in order to be able to use the video call feature on Google Hangouts (this feature is officially brokee in later versions and they haven't released a fix for it yet). I've used portable versions of Firefox in the past before with no problem, but this time it's not working. After extracting the contents of the "paf.exe" file to a new folder called "Firefox Portable", I had four folders within that folder, with idfferent sizes and contents but all called "*� (invalid encoding)", where * stands for a little square containing the digits "00, 03", which this forum will not let me paste for some reason. Among the contents of those folders were three files that looked as if they could be the program itself: "FirefoxPortable.exe" of 201.4 kB, "firefoxportable.exe" of 517.1 kB, and "firefox.exe" of 477.1 kB. Well, I've tried all of thenm and none of them will run.

I'm using Zorin 9 Linux (a variant of Ubuntu). I tried it normally (just by double-clicking the file) and the pointer turned into an hourglass for a few seconds and then went back again and nothing further happened, and I tried right-clicking and selectring "Open with Wine" and I got a miniature error message that just said "Invalid name", whatever that means.

Can anoyne shed any light on what's wrong and how I can get the wrretched thing running, please? Thanks, A. B.

John T. Haller
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Wine

You need to have Wine installed and then run the Firefox Portable installer from Wine to extract it. Then run FirefoxPortable.exe via Wine. I doubt video will work via Wine.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

A. B.
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Last seen: 6 years 2 months ago
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Thanks. I'm still a bit new

Thanks. I'm still a bit new to Linux as you may have guessed - I should remember that Linux doesn't use the extension ".EXE", so anything with that extension must be a Windows program and needs Wine. It worked fine under Wine, but you were right, Hangouts did fail, and at a different point than it did in regular Firefox - this time it didn't get as far as claiming to have installed the plug-in, it got as far as saying "Connecting to the Internet" when installing it and then said it couldn't and was my firewall blocking it, which it wasn't because as far as I can tell it wasn't switched on.
Good news is that I remembered that I still had Windows Vista available (dual-boot), so I tried running Portable ESR on THAT and installing the Hangouts plug-in on that and it works at last! Problem solved. It's fiddly but it works. I'm glad Firefox Portable does exist, it's very handy for improvising my way round situations like this without risking messing up my m\ain copy.
Thanks again.
A. B.

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