[PortableFirefox] a couple of questions

[John T. Haller]

Howdy Matthew,

I'll hit your points as you bring them up...

> I'm curious about running FF - and possibly Thunderbird, and even 
> Sunbird - from a USB drive.
> 
> I'm working primarily on a Mac now, however, and so Portable Firefox 
> isn't going to do it for me, at least today - unless I can help you get 
> an OSX version working, which may be possible.

It is possible but there hasn't been much user interest and nearly zero 
developer interest.  I do have one interested party I need to drop a 
note to.

> In any case, I have a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. I'm trying to figure out how big a deal drive wear is on a (4GB) USB 
> drive.
> 
> I understand that one of your objectives with Portable Firefox is to 
> reduce drive wear. Can I ask you to elaborate on your concern re drive 
> wear? and/or suggest ways I can think about this issue, and/or resources 
> that will help me understand this (much!) better?...

As has been discussed many times in the mozillaZine forums (the primary 
support arena) Portable Firefox is mainly intended for -- and primarily 
used on -- flash-based memory devices.  Said devices have a finite 
lifespan measured in a number of writes.  I've made changes to the 
default Firefox configuration to minimize these.  It also speeds things 
up over USB 1.1 (which also applies to external hard drives).  You're 
welcome to change any of the options within Options if you'd like. 
You'd need to remove the disable ZUL cache entry in prefs.js as well, if 
desired.

> 2. I'm a big fan of GreaseMonkey. Do you know why Portable Firefox 
> breaks GM?...

GreaseMonkey is known incompatible at present.  This is mentioned on the 
project page under known issues.  PFF only fixes the c:baseURL="jar: 
lines in chrome.rdf.  GreaseMonkey uses c:baseURL="file:  Someone sent a 
fix to this list (which I just approved for posting), but I believe it 
causes a programatic loop in certain instances. (I'd added a similar 
item into the launcher before).  I may investigate this further when I 
have more time.

Regards,
John