Portable Apps
I’ve often found myself discomfited browsing the Net at a public computer or even with a friend’s PC – where’s my favourite browser? where are all my bookmarks? What is my mail password and so on.
Portable Apps are a good solution for this. I had some time yesterday to actually configure 2 portable apps on my thumb drive ((Portable Apps can eat up disk space. I’ve lost about 50 MB of my 256 MB drive to these apps, but I consider worth the space and I’m not going to be transferring gigantic files using my thumb drive anyway.
1. Pass2Go – Roboform’s portable password manager. Intergrates beautifully with an existing standard installation of Roboform as well. Never forget a password again!
2. Portable Firefox – Probably the app that started the Portable application craze. It doesn’t pay to copy your standard Firefox profile blindly over though. I wound up hanging my Portable Firefox install when I copied all the extensions I use over.
I ruthlessly went through my extensions folder, copying over only what I absolutely needed as extensions. My final portable firefox extension list is below:
- Flashblock
- Connection Manager
- Tabbrowser Preferences
- SiteAdvisor
- Google Toolbar
- Adblock
- SessionSaver (I can’t quite make up my mind on this one)
- Roboform (Pass2Go works with Portable Firefox thanks to this 🙂 )
- CoComment
- Greasemonkey
- Luna Theme
- Filterset.G Updater
- ImgLikeOpera
I was astonished at the final result – When I started up Portable Firefox, I actually wondered “Did I start the portable app or regular firefox”? It felt that similar.
I totally recommend Portable apps now – in fact I’m looking for an excuse to whip out my thumb drive now 🙂
PS: A good result of that exercise was that I’ve got a better idea of the plugins I really really need. Time to clean up the Firefox extension list 🙂