Turn Mozilla Apps into Portable Apps

Mozilla apps such as FireFox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird are not portable because they store most of their data under the system app data folder on the Windows drive by default. App Briefcase will allow you to run Mozilla apps as portable apps by managing their app data, but this can be inefficient because FireFox and Thunderbird in particular can have very large app data folders. That means it may take App Briefcase a significant amount of time to synchronize the data for those apps.

Nearly all of the data used by a Mozilla app is contained in a "profile" folder. The FireFox profile folder contains cached web site data, cookies, add-ons, and other data. The Thunderbird profile folder contains e-mail, attachments, add-ons, and other data. As you can imagine, those profile folders can become quite large. Fortunately, Mozilla apps provide a means of relocating profile folders to a USB drive.

Mozilla apps allow you to specify the location of the profile folder on the command line. This allows you to store Mozilla profile folders on your USB drive along with the Mozilla apps. The following example demonstrates use of the "profile" parameter:

The first part of the command line represents the path to the FireFox program file on the USB drive. The "-profile" parameter is then used to direct FireFox to use the FireFox profile data found in folder M:\My Data\My FireFox Profile on the same USB drive. This example would appear in App Briefcase's menu configuration window as shown here:

If you already have existing profile data in the default location on the Windows main drive you can move the folder to your USB drive. The FireFox default profile folder can be found by entering the following path into the Address box of a Windows Explorer window:

The %appdata% portion of the path leads to a different folder location depending on the version of Windows you are using. Note that the Profiles folder may contain multiple profiles. Typically, the path of the FireFox default profile folder in Windows XP will look something like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\solp8vwh.default

Following our example above, the solp8vwh.default folder would be copied to the USB drive as M:\My Data\My FireFox Profile.

The Thunderbird default profile folder can be moved in the same manner as described for FireFox above. The Thunderbird default profile folder can be found by entering the following path into the Address box of a Windows Explorer window:

Mozilla apps may continue to access a few folders under the system app data folder, and a few system registry entries, even after the profile folder has been moved to the USB drive. However, those remaining data accesses represent only a tiny amount of data and are not critical to the functioning of Mozilla apps.

Tip:

It's a good idea to keep your FireFox and Thunderbird app profiles encrypted if you do not want anyone to be able to read your e-mail or follow your web browsing history. An easy way to do this is to use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted disk volume on your USB drive. You can then store your Mozilla profiles on the encrypted volume where they can not be accessed without the proper password.