[PortableFirefox] a couple of questions

[Matthew Weymar]

Tks for your reply, John. More below...

On 6/27/05, John T. Haller <mozdev at johnhaller.com> wrote:

> 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.

 Not sure how much help I could be with this, but I'd be happy to contribute 
- at a minimum by testing, etc....
 
> > 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.

 OK, tks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydrive#Strengths_and_weaknesses addresses 
some of my concerns / curiosity in the following:

"In normal use, mid-range flash drives currently on the market will support 
several million cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the 
device ages. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive as a 
hard drive to run application software or an operating system."

(This comment is followed by an oblique reference to the Portable Firefox 
project: "To address this (and the space limitations common on flash drives) 
some developers have produced versions of operating systems (such as
Linux<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux>)
or commonplace applications (such as the Mozilla
Firefox<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox>)
designed to run from flash drives." Perhaps this ref. should be less 
oblique!)

In any case, this info is only so helpful, as I am a bit stuck as to how to 
estimate the number of "cycles," or "write cycles" various setups would 
generate.

I notice, e.g., that you disable Browser History, and Disk Cache. I'm 
wondering how many cycles this will save me, for example? Obviously it 
depends on my browsing habits, which I guess I can measure / estimate using 
my browser history(!)

Should I assume 1 write to History, and 1 write to Cache = 2 cycles per URL 
in my history?... (Not sure how cache works exactly - nor revisiting 'sites, 
nor 'sites that update automatically.)

Ditto cookies. These seem a bit harder to measure, but by the same token, 
probably less of an issue. Maybe worth keeping???...

Ultimately, I would be curious to know: How much money am I saving here?... 
Or is that not the right rubric at all?... I take it that the point is to 
prolong the life of my device - so I don't have to go out buy another one - 
and so I'm trying to figure out by how long I will be able to prolong it by 
making certain sacrifices, obviously so that I can figure out which 
sacrifices I do and don't want to make.

Assuming I'm not the *only* one - though there may not be many - who is 
similarly curious, and similarly clueless, it occurs to me that you might 
want to add something on this subject to your Portable Firefox
page<http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/>.
E.g., "For more on the limited lifespans of USB key drives, check out 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydrive#Strengths_and_weaknesses," or 
paraphrase this yourself.

Ideally, you might provide some estimates as to the number of write cycles 
one would save by using Portable Firefox based on various assumptions.

> 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), 


Logged and noted. Thanks!

And pls do let me know if you, or anyone else decides to pick up the OSX 
torch.

Regards,
Matthew

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
> 
<http://www.weymar.com>
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