January 17, 2005
portable firefox breaks 100,000 downlaods
John Haller has done an amazing job with Portable Firefox 1.0. There is no better affirmation of that than downloads; more than 100,000 people can't be wrong. If you haven't tried portable Firefox yet, you really should. These USB flash devices are getting dirt cheap and they're just so convenient.
And don't forget Portable Thunderbird and Portable Nvu. With most new USB flash devices you should have room for them all. I'm wondering when we'll hear about the first people using Firefox from an iPod Shuffle :-) update: hehe, just as I posted this, I found this weblog post :-)
(this image was just a quick photoshop hack, sorry if that confused folks.)
Posted by asa at January 17, 2005 12:26 AM
Do you know how great the idea behind the really picture is?
I suggest Mozilla Foundation starts selling branded pendrives bundled with a preinstalled browser, email-klient and so on. Add a little autourun-menu and you have a regular pendrive with out-of-the-box added value. An added value that can't be matched by IE.
Posted by: thing on January 17, 2005 02:46 AMYes, the picture is brilliant. Where could I buy such a USB-stick with preinstalled Firefox? ;-)
Posted by: ddw on January 17, 2005 03:11 AMGood idea! Find some cheap(-ish) USB drive manuacturer, so that they will SELL and not just collect dust in the mozilla store.
Posted by: David Naylor on January 17, 2005 04:08 AMI was thinking the same thing when I saw the picture. Who made the picture? Is there a real idea behind that picture?
Posted by: David Tenser on January 17, 2005 05:10 AMI've seen a marketing bug with this idea on it.
Posted by: Richard Klein on January 17, 2005 06:20 AMThe text doesn't flow around the picture in the nightly build I am using (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050116 Firefox/1.0+). It looks fine in Firefox 1.0 though. Is that a known bug?
Posted by: Christian on January 17, 2005 06:24 AM>I've seen a marketing bug with this idea on it.
Maybe https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226848
Hey, Asa... thanks for the blog mention :-)
For the curious, yes there are a couple people pursuing a Portable Firefox pre-installed USB key. A couple companies unrelated to the Mozilla foundation are already doing so.
Also, if you're interested, in addition to Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird, I recently released Portable NVU which works the same way, now that the 0.7 release is Firefox-based.
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/
Posted by: John T. Haller on January 17, 2005 06:54 AMChristian, I need to get a bug on file for that. If you zoom the fonts or otherwise cause a reflow (resize the window, I think) it fixes itself. I've got to get a minimal testcase before the layout guys will look at it though. Any help with that would be appreciated.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on January 17, 2005 10:09 AMI have made a small testcase and filed a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278861
Posted by: Christian on January 18, 2005 10:14 AMChristian, Thanks!!
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on January 18, 2005 01:01 PMBuy a Portable Firefox Pen-Drive
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5069
USB Pen Drives with Firefox Logo
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5201#comment-10653
Does anyone know for a fact (evidence?) that the lifespan of flash drives is affected by the number of writes? I've read bits and pieces of stats but nothing conclusive enough for me. I'm interested in trying this, but there's no way i could go without History. I basically want my full-blown desktop install of Firefox on my keychain.
Posted by: miahz on January 19, 2005 06:06 PMDoes anyone know for a fact (evidence?) that the lifespan of flash drives is affected by the number of writes?
miahz... EVERY drive will list its lifespan in terms of writes within its specifications (unless the documentation is hopelessly incomplete). If you don't believe the specs, try placing your windows swap file on your usb key for a while and watch it die. :-)
Posted by: John T. Haller on January 20, 2005 09:15 AMHmm. So then running a "full-blown" install from a flash drive wouldn't really work out. I guess i'll have to rethink how i'd use Portable Firefox.
Posted by: miahz on January 21, 2005 01:46 AMI try to install pff on my qdi-usb stick. While copying to the disk the system hooks up. After starting new there are much destroyed files and files who cannot deletet (and have fantasy sizes) on the usb disk. This will only happened when copying portable ff. With other files there are no problems (The stick works normal). Who can give me a hint?
Posted by: fuzzyjone on January 23, 2005 08:03 AM