Firefox at Work

Recently I posted about my Top 5 Firefox Extensions (link), and it occured to me, I don't have Firefox at work! We still use good old ie6 for internet browsing which mildly irritates me. I dont have to explain why Firefox is better than ie6, because there are a number of blogs that may still be arguing that point. Just google it.
I decided that I needed Firefox for browsing, particularly because it handles logmein much better than freezy ie6. I didnt want to install anything on my work machine, so I made my way over to portableapps.com (link). Portableapps offers portable solutions to common programs, so that you can load it onto any USB drive, and have the software be fully functional. Luckily enough for me, they have a portable edition of Firefox. Which is exactly what I needed. So, at home, I downloaded the portableapps Firefox installer and loaded it onto my usb drive.
OK. So I now have a fully functional copy of Firefox that is not installed on my work pc. But I figure that since my work does not have it pre-installed on their machines, then they probably dont want it running on them. So I figured its time for some modding.

I decided that I wanted Firefox to resemble ie6, so that there would be no foul play suspected. After a little googling, I made my way over to JohnHaller's blog (link), and found that he describes exactly how to make Firefox look like ie6. I won't post his instructions here, but they are pretty simple and only require you to download some Firefox icons and an extension.

Great! Now firefox looks like ie6! Its perfect, but for companies who block the process firefox.exe (you know, like in the task manager). You need to take one more step before using the browser.
The portableapps version of Firefox seems to be able to handle this perfectly. Located in the \Other\FirefoxPortableSource folder wherever you installed the program is a file named FirefoxPortable.ini. Open this file up in your favorite text editor and change the "FirefoxExecutable=Firefox.exe" to whatever you want to call it. I called mine svchost.exe because there are 7 million of those currently running on my computer at any given time, so one more probably isnt going to be noticed. Make sure you save the ini in the same folder as your FirefoxPortable executable or the changes won't take effect. Browse to the \App\Firefox folder. Change the name of your Firefox executable (mine is svchost.exe) and youre ready to go!


So now I have a copy of Firefox that looks like ie6, but has the functionality of mozilla. Also it shows up as an additional svchost.exe in the task manager. This worked out well.















Note: Picture may be breaking the space-time continuum.


Files Needed for this mod:
Firefox Portable
Looks Familiar Firefox Theme
Firefox Internet Explorer Icons Pack
Firesomething 1.7 (Hacked for Firefox 2.0) Extension