Portable Firefox and Foldershare: A great way to do stuff.



If like me you use the internet and use more than two computers then things exactly like the following will surely have happened to you:

  • Your sitting at work, browsing the web in your very extended lunch break. You find a website you would love to browse more, but in the privacy of your own home. You add the bookmark.... back at home you realise that the bookmark is still on our computer at work. You try to remember UR:, but the site was in Russia and had characters that don’t exist on any keyboard within thirty miles. You spend the rest of the night crying your eyes out because you realise that there’s not much point in living without that bookmark.
  • You sigh up to a very special members only site, this time in Venezuela . You need to go to an internet cafe that allows you pay by cash and wear a hoodie and shades. You’re there sitting with the homeless prostitutes and the online crack dealers when you realise your cookies are not with you so you can’t login to the site.
  • You wish that you didn’t have to worry about synchronisation of all of your browser data and tools and settings between computers.

If, like me, any of these issues have concerned or confronted you, then read on... there are solutions.

There are in fact many solutions and over the years I have tried most of them. The one I’m going to suggest has been mine for many months in various guises. There have been problems, these are now solved and I am ready to unleash it upon the world. Go wash your hands, button down the hatches, I am about to unleash:


Five simple steps.

  1. Download Portable Firefox. Portable Firefox is a version of the world’s best web browser that has been tweaked to make it Portable; it can be run from any folder, USB Drive, IPOD etc. Download it here and install it in a place you will remember. I have it in My Documents>My Applications>Portable Firefox.
  2. Set everything up in this installation of Portable Firefox, your bookmarks, extensions, web sites, layout. Make it just how you want it and back it up. One great thing about backing up Portable Apps is it means simply copy the folder.
  3. Download Google Browser Sync This will synchronise all of your Settings and bookmarks and cookies . Once installed, set it up. It won’t synchronise Extensions and themes and interface changes, however.
  4. Download Foldershare. This is an amazing bit of free software, recently bought by Microsoft. You will need to download it and install it on all PCs you want to sync. Have a play with it and a read of the help files if you get confused, but its very easy once you get the hang.
  5. Using Foldershare, share your Portable Firefox on all the PCs you want to sync with and let Foldershare do its magic.

Note: The Portable Firefox cache can become corrupted if you switch between different PCs before Foldershare has had the chance to update. I always wait a few minutes between closing one Firefox (on Desktop) and opening another, say on my laptop. This gives Foldershare the time to Sync the changed files.


If you follow these 5 simple steps, you can become more productive, more helpful around the house and better within the community you live in.


It would be churlish not to.