Web Browser and E-mail Client Portable Internet

You travel a lot and very often you need to access
your mail and the Internet from various
locations. However, you don’t have a laptop
and so you often need to access information
from public places and computer in other
offices. How could you keep your
familiar web browser and POP mail
client with you and use this to access the
Internet?

=> If you’re addicted to your specifi c
settings on your browser and e-mail client,
it’s only natural that you’d want the exact
same settings no matter where you go.
There’s hope—portable versions of web
browsers like Firefox and e-mail clients like
Thunderbird do exist. Using these scaleddown
applications, you can carry them on
a portable storage medium like a thumb
drive, an MP3 player like the iPod.
To start off, you’d be best off getting
yourself a USB 2.0 enabled thumb drive
as these will give you the best application
response compared to those based on the
older USB 1.1 standard. A 256 MB drive
should more than suffi ce, with space to
spare for your other fi les. Then, you would
need to download and use the portable
versions of a browser like Portable Firefox
(portablefi refox.mozdev.org) for your
web browsing and Portable Thunderbird
(portablethunderbird.mozdev.org) for
your e-mail client. You can even try out
Portable Nvu (portablenvu.mozdev.org)
and Portable Sunbird (portablesunbird.
mozdev.org) for browsing and e-mailing
respectively. All of these applications are
specifi cally optimized for use on a USB
thumb drive—they are small to begin with,
they minimize the amount of times they
write to the device and don’t store data
like web pages by default. All of this makes
for a very usable experience while working
with these applications.
A portable drive is highly susceptible to
being stolen or pilfered. So you can use the
fi le encryption software that came with
your thumb drive or download third-party
encryption applications such as Cypherix
Cryptainer LE (www.cypherix.co.uk) or
Dekart Private Disk Light (www.dekart.
com) to add an extra level of security to
your portable applications.