One of the requests that I frequently receive with every Firefox 3 Alpha release is to put together a portable build that people can play with. That way they don’t need to worry about messing up their existing Firefox installation or profile, and when they have had enough with it they can simply delete the folder it resides in.
Download Squad found a site that ingeniously created a script which automatically downloads the latest nightly release of Firefox. That means right now it is grabbing the nightly builds of Firefox 3, and after that branches off it will begin grabbing Firefox 4 nightly releases.
All you have to do is download the version of Portable Firefox that includes the updater (Download Mirror). After you extract the files you’ll see a file called Updater.exe, and that’s what you need to run first. The download of the latest Firefox 3 nightly build will be initiated, and you should see the download progress in the System Tray (similar to the screenshot I took above). After the download is done the Updater will extract the contents using 7-Zip (already included), and it will place the files in the appropriate directory.
How long the actual process takes depends on how fast your Internet connection is, and for me it was done in less than a minute. Overall this is a great idea, and I think it would be even more awesome if there was an option to specify the URL of the download. That way you could pick and choose which version you wanted to run!
Instructions on doing this process manually can be found here, which also includes details on copying your existing Firefox profile over to the portable setup.
Get the Portable Firefox Updater (Download Mirror)
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Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Software, Alpha, Downloads, Firefox 3, Portable Firefox, System Tray
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Thanks for great post, I was thinking of downloading firefox 3 but was going to wait a little longer. No need Thanks Again
I downloaded this and ran the updater, but my question is this: do I have to run the updater every time before I run that PortableFirefox installation or do I just open that PortableFirefox.exe and it will update automatically?
Max, the updater is only required the first time before you open the Firefox application. After that, if you want to download a new build each day, that is what the updater is for.
can’t you just reconfigure the built in update feature for firefox to check nightlies rather than releases? if you change second preference in the file “channel-prefs.js” to:”release”,”beta”, or “nightly”. don’t include quotes.
So for it to update to the latest nightly build after the first one, all I have to do is open Firefox and it will auto-update right?
Yep, you’re correct. That’s all you gotta do.
If you want to change your channel that is all you have to do, and then it won’t do the nightlies if you don’t want it to.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try !
One question : is it possible to run two different versions of Firefox at the same time (FF2 and FF3), or is there a risk of some conflicts between them ?
Hmm, the updater doesn’t seem to work like it should. I opened the PortableFirefox that the installer came with and nothing updated. I clicked Help>Check for updates… and an update was available. Shouldn’t it have downloaded automatically? I could download it manually but that would defeat the purpose of an auto-updater.
@s427: Yes, you can run two versions of Firefox simultaneously as long as at least one of them is a portable version. The portable version uses a seperate profile than your normal Firefox so there risk in using it at the same time. If you want to do that just open the INI file that is located in the Portable Firefox directory and set the multiple instances option to true.
@Max: The auto-updater only checks for updates periodically. I think it is like every 4 to 8 hours.
So that means I have to have PortableFirefox open for 4-8 hours for it to perform an auto-update? I must me missing something…
Well, I did a little research and as it turns out Firefox checks once each day for an update, but you can modify a value in the about:config to make it more frequent. Information on that can be found here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.interval
What if you’re behind a firewall, and the updater.exe can’t get out?
Can it use HTTP through a proxy? That’s the only way I’ll be able to use it here at work.
I do not believe this will work with a proxy.