It was about one-week ago when I posted an article regarding the PhotoBucket Flock and Max had a very good question. He wondered if there was any way that I could make a Portable Flock and that got me thinking. Flock is based off of Firefox so I saw no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get Flock to work with it.
I want to start by saying that this whole thing wouldn’t be possible without the great work that John Haller has done on Portable Firefox. I watch his news quite closely and his newest version of Portable Firefox, when it gets released, will have the ability to update itself. Right now Portable Firefox cannot download the partial updates but that will soon be a thing of the past. So I just wanted to say thanks to John for making this Portable Flock possible!
It took a little editing and very small code modifications (because John designed Portable Firefox so well that it was easy to modify) but I got it to work. Now I don’t use Flock on a daily basis so I am not sure about the stability but it should satisfy the needs of most people out there. I will admit that when Flock first came out I never gave it much of a chance, but after creating this Portable version and using it for a few hours I have to say it is extremely sweet! In one of my posts Ryan Williams and I were having a discussion about integrated feed readers and how great Firefox would be if it had one. Well, he was definitely right when he said “Flock is a great example of how RSS can work beautifully in a browser”. So that more people can see just how nice the RSS reader is I put this Portable version together. You can now try it out and see if it is really right for your purposes without even needing to install it. Heck, you can even throw this on your USB drive and carry it with you which would be like having Flock-On-The-Go 
.
These are the instructions that you need to use the Portable Flock. All you have to do is download the Portable Flock file below. Then you unzip the file and browse for the file PortableFlock.exe. Just execute that file and you will be running Flock! The profile is kept with the PortableFlock folder so you don’t have to worry about messing up your other profile and the uninstallation process is simple…just delete the folder!
I know that John Haller has run into trademark issues in the past with Mozilla, and if Flock contacts me to remove this file I will gladly do so. I can only imagine that it would help them out because they will receive their revenue from the search bar and this might increase the number of users. Also, I normally ZIP up the files but when I zipped up the file it was still over 10MB! To bring the size down I compressed it using RAR which brought it down to 8.32MB, man what a difference.
Okay, you can download it now:
Download Portable Flock 0.7.1
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Tags: Pre-Release, Software
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Just a piece of information: Ferrite has put together for some time now (since the first Developer Preview), a portable version of the Flock browser that now is called PocketFlock. His work involves more than just making it portable, tough.
You can find it here.
Thanks a lot for putting this together.
No problem Max, I am actually getting addicted to Flock. It is hard to say for sure at this point but I think I might like it more than Firefox *gasp*.
-Ryan
Sorry the above trackback (no.5) won’t work. I just reset my blog for permalinks.
How to update to latest version of Flock is here: http://minihelpfiles.com/2006/.....ble-flock/
I LOVE Portable Flock!
Simon
I updated your trackback for you.
-Ryan
Hi there,
Firstly, nice work on making Flock portable. Bravo, really.
Sadly, I found that it is not quite “portable,” in that it leaves behind a folder (”Flock”) with a subfolder (”Browser”) and “pluginreg.dat” file under x:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\
Thanks for your hard work. Good luck figuring out how to avoid this issue. I sure can’t make any progress!
Thanks for letting me know. I will go ahead and look into it.
Hi Ryan,
Any plans to keep going with this project? I’d love to have a portable version of Flock 1.2beta.
Do you have any documentation out there that would guide someone to making Flock USB-able again?
thanks,
Dariusz
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time right now to work on this, and it didn’t work 100% as it should anyway. It would still create a profile folder on the computer, and so it wasn’t 100% portable.