Portable Firefox Editor's Review

Portable Firefox is the popular Mozilla Firefox but under a portable package.

Instead of using a local folder for its profile, this application uses a folder inside the .app package. Running the product for the first time onto a machine would ask if it should copy the data from your Firefox profile. In order to do that, of course, you would need to be a Firefox user with an existing profile on the account that you are using.

The application copies all your data including the history and the cookies. I was quite surprise to see that it uses the history, because usually the history usage increases the number of the write operations to the storage device. This isn't a good thing since the portable flash drives, or any drive that uses flash memory would suffer because of this.

The life of the chips used into the flash memories is limited to around 100,000 write cycles, so this is the reason why using the history isn't a good thing. I have used a similar application under Windows. It was more USB flash drive friendly because it didn't use the history.

Even though this is a portable application, it has the same behavior as the original Firefox 2.0. I was glad to see all my extensions installed onto this version.

Since it acts like the original, the rendering engine is the same. I tested the browser with the Acid2 test even though I knew the result before testing it.

Pluses: it is a portable application. That means you can use it on any Mac if you carry it onto a portable storage device.

Drawbacks / flaws: it uses the history which increases the number of writes to the portable device. This is not friendly for the device, but the functionality isn't affected by this. In fact the functionality is better than some other similar projects.

In conclusion: this is Firefox on the fly. If you like using your browser with every Mac you use, and your browser is Mozilla Firefox 2.0, this is the solution.

version reviewed: 2.0r4