At MERIT, we very recently came across a scenario where (long story short…) one of our members could not run an application to get access to the router to gain access through to the World Wide Web through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Another alternative browser was necessary to gain access to the router.
We had heard of an application called Portable Firefox whose main feature is that it can be run independently of the computer registry from any USB flash drive. A member of our staff had such a two year old barely-working flash drive on his keyring so decided to put this application to the test and see if it worked.
Needless to say it did even on an old ‘Gig-Stick’. The control test was to run it on a PC in our offices at Liverpool Digital which had never had the Mozilla browser installed on it previously. It turns out that the program can indeed run without having Firefox installed on the computer and it will not obstruct or interfere with any previously installed versions of Firefox.
This is a very useful tool as you can customize the browser to include bookmarks and certain plugins and store extensions and themes directly to the flash drive.
How to get Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition
1. First of all you need to visit the Portable Apps website at the following link :-
(http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable)
…and click on the Download Now button. Download the installation file to a suitable place on your computer, for the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll use the Desktop.
2. Once downloaded to the desktop, double click on the .exe file to start the installation wizard.
By the time you have agreed to terms and conditions and have arrived at the third screen on the installation wizard, you will have needed to have installed and have plugged into the USB port on your computer the flash device you want to install the Portable Firefox program to.
On the third screen of the wizard, you need to click the Browse button and locate the Flash Drive on your computer. Click on the Next button and allow the wizard to install the application to your drive.
3. Once installation is complete, you should be able to open up your Flash drive and see the Firefox Portable folder. As you can see, from the screenshot below there are five icons. To launch the Portable Firefox application, double click on the FirefoxPortable icon.
The Firefox browser will then open up, connect to the internet and run from your Flash drive. This will not take you any longer then five to ten minutes and is very easy to implement and manage.
Tags: firefox portable, MERIT, meritnorthwest, Merseyside, Mozilla Firefox
September 17, 2007 at 7:28 pm |
Nice blog and I will continue to read it.