Bookmarks in portable firefox

February 7, 2006 5:43 PM

How do I load my bookmarks and passwords to Portable Firefox from Firefox 1.5

I've searched and I searched and can't figure this one out. Running versions 1.5 of Firefox and portable Firefox.

posted by drezdn to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Bookmarks: the bookmarks.html in your FF profile.
Passwords: (I had to google for this, you could have too): http://www.holgermetzger.de/moz-passwords.html
posted by orthogonality at 6:19 PM on February 7, 2006

The simplest way to do this is to just copy over your profile to the portable installation. This carrys over all of your settings, passwords and bookmarks included. Instructions are here: http://portableapps.com/support/portable_firefox#local_profile
posted by gwenzel at 6:47 PM on February 7, 2006

But if you copy your whole profile, be sure to turn off caching if your portable drive is a flash drive...the frequent writes will wreck a flash drive pretty quickly.
posted by lhauser at 7:46 PM on February 7, 2006

Thanks. In gwenzel's link, do I need to turn off the passwords? Am I right in assuming that it will load and save any password info to the flash drive?
posted by drezdn at 8:32 PM on February 7, 2006

I'd like to toss in a reminder that, if you lose this flash drive, it will be trivial for anyone who finds it to get these passwords. In fact, the site that orthogonality contains instructions on exactly how.
posted by CrayDrygu at 8:35 PM on February 7, 2006

CrayDrygu, understood. To me, not having to relogin into sites I use regularly was part of the point of using portable firefox, but now I'm conflicted.
posted by drezdn at 8:48 PM on February 7, 2006

If I may make a non-FireFox suggestion, I personally use KeePass with a strong passphrase. With its auto-type feature, logging into a site is as easy as pressing Ctrl-Alt-A and entering your master password -- the program types the site's username and password for you. And all of its data is kept in a well-encrypted database.

I've got it on my flash drive. The encrypted database was the only way I'd keep my passwords on it, and the auto-type feature works with any browser.
posted by CrayDrygu at 9:14 PM on February 7, 2006

An alternative for securing the passwords (it's less secure than Keepass, but it's convenient) is to turn on the "master password" option within Firefox. Instructions here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Master_password

It'll still be possible to crack into the passwords if somebody really wants to (having a strong password will make this more difficult). It should be good enough, however, to prevent any casual snoops from getting your passwords.

An even more secure option is to use Truecrypt and encrypt the whole partition that Firefox (and anything else you have that you want to keep secure) is on.
posted by gwenzel at 8:39 AM on February 8, 2006

For anyone that comes across this, I had originally tried Orthogonality's way of solving the problem. The initial problem I had was that there are two profile folders with bookmarks.html (one in the mozilla folder and one in the application data folder. Copying all the files in the folder gwenzel points too (minus the cache) worked.

The master password on mozilla seems like it might provide me enough security though I'm going to look into encrypting it.

Thanks everyone.
posted by drezdn at 1:42 PM on February 8, 2006