PortableFirefox is magic

I had used PortableFirefox in one of its earlier in one of its earlier incarnations and although the concept was good, there was a questions of usefulness. Firstly, many of the plugins either didn't work, or didn't work well. Secondly, there was the problem of keeping a concurrent second list of bookmarks. When everything was done, it seemed more logical to simply use the default installed browser on the work computer.

Yesterday, I revisited PortableFirefox and I am now mightily impressed with how it has progressed. Firstly, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave work completely. Most extensions to PortableFirefox works just like to the standard installation of Firefox. Even more remarkably, updates to Firefox work perfectly for PortableFirefox as well.

I normally use Google Browser Sync to for bookmark and history management and I can happily report that it works perfectly with PortableFirefox as well! For me, this is quite important as I often do research on the web at home and would save a number of links on any browsing session for later review. With Google Browser Sync, when I load up PortableFirefox in almost any location, it is as if I have my browser on my home PC - all my internet history and bookmarks are immediately and completely available.

With regards to performance, PortableFirefox is inevitably slightly slower, being installed on a USB memory key rather than on the hard disk but nevertheless, it is still surprisingly snappy.