Taking Firefox with You on the Road: Using a USB Thumb Drive
- Why Run Firefox Off of a USB Drive? Portability, Silly!
- Gathering the Materials
- Installing and Launching Portable Firefox
- Migrating Local Firefox Settings to Portable Firefox
- Migrating Your Firefox Plugins
- Further Exploring the World of Portability
- Conclusion
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve heard of (or you are already using) Mozilla Firefox. Tens of millions of estimated users have now adopted Firefox as their Web browser of choice. Some estimates say that Firefox has grabbed 10 percent of the Web browser market. At the time of this article’s writing, Mozilla Firefox was in version 1.5.0.2. Firefox claims a "better Web experience." The browser has features like tabbed browsing and live bookmarks (bookmarks that update themselves automatically) as well as a myriad of other cool features. You can learn more about the features of Firefox here. One of the magnetic characteristics of Firefox that has attracted many users is its comparatively small size—version 1.5.0.2 is only a 4.9MB download. It is this small footprint that is key to enabling the subject of this article: showing you how you can run Firefox off of a USB hard drive (commonly referred to as a USB thumb drive).
Why Run Firefox Off of a USB Drive? Portability, Silly!
So why would I want to run Firefox off of a USB drive, anyway? The answer to this question is quite simple: portability. In addition to the browser, you can take with you your own bookmarks, cookies, Firefox extensions, and everything that makes your browser yours. All the browser data is stored on your USB thumb drive. For frequent travelers who don’t want to take their computer wherever they go and like to use public computers while on the road, being able to take your browser with you is quite a boon.