Mozilla Firefox is certainly one of the top popular web browsers in the world today. It is released under various channels like the release version which is the final tested version and the nightly builds which are the work-in-progress versions of Firefox. If you want to try out the nightly builds and check out the new features that Firefox is putting in the next versions, then the best choice is to use the portable edition of Firefox. This way you do not have to install multiple versions of Firefox in Windows in order to check them out. Here is how you can create a portable edition of Firefox in Windows:
Note: Before proceeding, you should install the 7-Zip software in Windows. It is free and is required to extract the contents of the Firefox setup file.
- First of all, you have to download the full setup package of Firefox for Windows. Do not download the express setup installer. The full setup package is a around 40 megabytes in size. You can find the setup packages at the following links.
- After you have downloaded the Firefox setup file, copy it over to your USB disk or a folder where you want to create the portable edition of Firefox. For example, I am going to creating the portable edition in the C:\Firefox folder. Then right-click on the setup installer file and choose 7-Zip → Extract Here as shown in the picture.
- This would extract the contents of the setup file to a folder named core. Another file setup.exe is also extracted, which you can delete if you want. You can also delete the full setup file that you copied in step 2 above.
- Create a new file start.bat with the following contents (of course, change the path as per step 2 above) :
@echo off
start C:\Firefox\core\firefox.exe -Profile “Profile/”
exit
Save this start.bat file in C:\Firefox or wherever you copied the setup file in step 2 above.
- That’s it. You have the portable edition of Firefox ready to be used. If you have installed Firefox on your system, close all the open Firefox windows because only one version of Firefox can be run at a single time. Now you can double-click on the start.bat file to run the portable Firefox.