Taming Firefox for Flash Drive installs, & general usage

[maluvia]

I don't like filling up my backup file for reasons of both performance, & on flash drives, to minimize the number of writes to the drive.  For this reason it is important to get Firefox under control, as it is one of the biggest offenders.

I use a two-fold approach to this: create the default user profile in a persistent opt directory, and turn off disk caching in the firefox configuration.
(I use only Namoroka from the tcz repo as I have had too many problems with mainline firefox, but the same method applies to both.)

First: Create a directory in opt owned by tc/staff where you will put your firefox profile. You can just name it firefox or namoroka.

Second: Do a clean install of Firefox/Namoroka, and go into the profile manager before you open firefox for a first-run.
[This is important to keep it from creating the default profile in home/tc]

Code: (bash) [Select]

$ user/local/namoroka/firefox -ProfileManageror

Code: (bash) [Select]

$ user/local/firefox-official/firefox -ProfileManager
The profile manager should show no profiles have been created yet.
Let your profile be called Default User as it suggests, but choose your own folder to place it in, and browse to the location of your created firefox folder in opt.
(This will create a .mozilla folder in home, and a profile.ini, but everything else will go to opt.)

On first-run of firefox, go to about:config, promise to be careful, and type cache in the search box.
Go to the line browser.cache.disk.enable, right click on it, and click toggle.
[NB: This step is only important for usb flash drives or ssd drives where the number of writes to the disk needs to be minimized]

That's it. It works really well.
I've run into some instability when I had gazillions of add-ons installed, but decided the solution was to cut back on the add-ons ;-)

Long-life to your flash & ssd drives! 

[OldAdamUser2]

I take a different approach to keeping Firefox in control. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced. Toggle the box to override cache management and limit the disk cache to "0". This forces Firefox to run entirely in RAM. It works well if your computer has sufficient RAM. My Eee900 has 1 GB of RAM and works well with this setup.

[netnomad]

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,9142.15.html
now i test and use icecat, it's like minefield6 but uses some plugins that should enhance the security...
additionally i load every time a basic and clean set of standard config files for my surf-session.
no sql or data-collecting journals or other suspect databases...
completed with noscript and some ssh-tunneled-proxies,
i guess that it could be a modern and secure way of web-experience...
no flash or script as long as i don't need them, all multimedia-stuff in that cases when i really want them.
and perhaps the gnu-project or the eff audit the config on the security aspects, too.

[jackson.lee]

I take a different approach to keeping Firefox in control. Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced. Toggle the box to override cache management and limit the disk cache to "0". This forces Firefox to run entirely in RAM. It works well if your computer has sufficient RAM. My Eee900 has 1 GB of RAM and works well with this setup.

OldAdam,
Excellent !