Roboblue
12-03-2004, 11:52 AM
For those interested, a guy named John Haller has developed portable versions of Mozilla's web browser (Firfox) and email (Thunderbird) programs. These are official releases and will be supported in the future.
They are designed to run specifically on USB Pen drives. I use both of these programs on my desktop pc's and will never go back to IE again. Thunderbird is very similiar to Outlook Express, but more features/power. Not as featured as Outlook.
The benifit of using them on the Pen drive is that you can carry your Favorites and your Address Book with you. When you use a host computer, there is NO trace left on it when you are done. All caches (browser) and messages (email) are stored on the Pen drive.
I have put them both on my personal Pen drive, but I think the email proggy probably will be the most used.
For example, over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent several days with my family quite a distance from home. Whenever I wanted to check my email, I just plugged in the USB drive into my daughters pc. I had done a nice little auto launcher for the apps in APMS that has my companies web theme. So I had instant choice of which program I wanted to run. All my email accounts are configured in Thunderbird (settings can be imported from OE) and it only took 20-30 seconds and I had my messages and was reading them. Then, fired up Firefox, and was surfing to my fav sites (this forum is one). When I was done, pulled the drive and left no trace on the host pc that I was even there.
There is a lot of potential with these programs. One of the things that makes them so powerful is the extension support. Translation bar, Adblock, FireFTP (a REALLY nice, simple FTP extension), etc. Hundreds of them available.
Anyway, for those who are interested, here is the address to John Hallers website:
John Haller (http://johnhaller.com/jh/)
They are designed to run specifically on USB Pen drives. I use both of these programs on my desktop pc's and will never go back to IE again. Thunderbird is very similiar to Outlook Express, but more features/power. Not as featured as Outlook.
The benifit of using them on the Pen drive is that you can carry your Favorites and your Address Book with you. When you use a host computer, there is NO trace left on it when you are done. All caches (browser) and messages (email) are stored on the Pen drive.
I have put them both on my personal Pen drive, but I think the email proggy probably will be the most used.
For example, over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent several days with my family quite a distance from home. Whenever I wanted to check my email, I just plugged in the USB drive into my daughters pc. I had done a nice little auto launcher for the apps in APMS that has my companies web theme. So I had instant choice of which program I wanted to run. All my email accounts are configured in Thunderbird (settings can be imported from OE) and it only took 20-30 seconds and I had my messages and was reading them. Then, fired up Firefox, and was surfing to my fav sites (this forum is one). When I was done, pulled the drive and left no trace on the host pc that I was even there.
There is a lot of potential with these programs. One of the things that makes them so powerful is the extension support. Translation bar, Adblock, FireFTP (a REALLY nice, simple FTP extension), etc. Hundreds of them available.
Anyway, for those who are interested, here is the address to John Hallers website:
John Haller (http://johnhaller.com/jh/)