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I use the Firefox portable app quite heavily. I like to separate my browsing into different buckets for different things. Yeah I know Firefox allows you to do t

I use the Firefox portable app quite heavily. I like to separate my browsing into different buckets for different things. Yeah I know Firefox allows you to do this with containers, but having a dedicated profile is better and it's difficult to confuse what context you are in. Then there's Firefox profiles, which is another way to divide up your browsing (which I use) but not as much as having dedicated portable Firefoxes I can use for different things. Over the years of using Firefox portable, I noticed that sometimes the update broke, since a whole new engine was created by Mozilla and the update wasn't graceful. But nevermind, I simply downloaded the latest version from Portableapps, and copied over the profile directory and I was good. I even have copies of old portable versions of Firefox like v56 that I use to test sites in, just incase my users are using some legacy version / old versions of Palemoon (for whatever reason).

lewantmontreal 5y ago
I use Firefox for everyday generic browsing, and Chrome for specific buckets. Chrome profiles are soo good and easy to use compared to Firefox profiles or containers. I’ll definitely look into portable Firefoxes for buckets.
- disadvantage 5y ago
  Isn't Chrome a privacy issue though? I inspected the traffic with Wireshark and saw loads of requests to Google. Then lately there is news about their upcoming extension Manifest stopping the ability to use uBlock and other privacy extensions, so I want to avoid Chrome. Heard good things about 'Ungoogled Chromium' however (you should check it out!)
timetraveller26 5y ago
You can also have different profiles in Firefox, you can launch the Profile Manager with firefox -P. I do this setting different skins for my profiles.
- disadvantage 5y ago
  Yeah I do this too. You can also navigate to `about:profiles` in the address bar and launch a profile of your choosing. In the end there's many ways to slice and dice different profile buckets. I use a combination of containers, profiles, and portable browsers. The beauty of portable browsers is you can 'clone' them so you don't have to configure new profiles. All your settings can be configured once, and copied to a clone portable browser which you use for a different context. BTW: Love the idea of using different themes/skins for different contexts :)
JohnTHaller 5y ago
In addition to all the current channels (stable, beta, dev, nightly, esr) we also have legacy builds available if you ever need to test on an old version: https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/legacy https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/lega... We also have the Second Profile utility so you can have as many easily launched profiles as you want portably since Firefox profile manager doesn't work portably.
- disadvantage 5y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this.

lewantmontreal 5y ago

I use Firefox for everyday generic browsing, and Chrome for specific buckets. Chrome profiles are soo good and easy to use compared to Firefox profiles or containers. I’ll definitely look into portable Firefoxes for buckets.

disadvantage 5y ago
Isn't Chrome a privacy issue though? I inspected the traffic with Wireshark and saw loads of requests to Google. Then lately there is news about their upcoming extension Manifest stopping the ability to use uBlock and other privacy extensions, so I want to avoid Chrome. Heard good things about 'Ungoogled Chromium' however (you should check it out!)

timetraveller26 5y ago

You can also have different profiles in Firefox, you can launch the Profile Manager with firefox -P. I do this setting different skins for my profiles.

disadvantage 5y ago
Yeah I do this too. You can also navigate to `about:profiles` in the address bar and launch a profile of your choosing. In the end there's many ways to slice and dice different profile buckets. I use a combination of containers, profiles, and portable browsers. The beauty of portable browsers is you can 'clone' them so you don't have to configure new profiles. All your settings can be configured once, and copied to a clone portable browser which you use for a different context. BTW: Love the idea of using different themes/skins for different contexts :)

JohnTHaller 5y ago

In addition to all the current channels (stable, beta, dev, nightly, esr) we also have legacy builds available if you ever need to test on an old version: https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/legacy https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/lega... We also have the Second Profile utility so you can have as many easily launched profiles as you want portably since Firefox profile manager doesn't work portably.

disadvantage 5y ago
Thanks for mentioning this.