How to Optimize Firefox Portable for Performance

Firefox Portable is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox created by John T. Haller. The application runs from an external USB flash drive, CDROM or other portable device on any Windows computer, Mac OS X computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine.
This portable version does not require Firefox to be installed on the host computer and does not leave any personal information on the host computer neither interferes with any installed versions of Firefox.

Firefox Portable runs quite efficiently from fast flash drives, portable hard drives or iPods if connected to a USB 2.0 port. But if your external USB stick is slow and/or you're stuck in a USB 1.1 connection you'll notice a slow-down in performance.

Firefox Portable has to read and write bits of data to and from your portable device while it's running. On most flash drives, every time something is written, all reads stop causing Firefox Portable to appear to "freeze" or "hesitate" momentarily.

However there are a few different things you can tweak to speed things up:

Disable Cache: Not meant for USB external drives, Cache will actually slow Firefox Portable down. If it's not disabled by default it can be disabled at the Options box.

Disable Session Restore / Undo Close Tab: Session Restore keeps track of all your open windows and tabs so you can restore your session if Firefox crashes. For that functionality to be active it has to write to disk on every page load, which slows down Firefox Portable.
To disable this feature you must:

1. In Firefox's address bar, type in about:config and then hit enter
2. Right-click on any entry and select New - Boolean
3. For the name, enter browser.sessionstore.enabled and click OK
4. Select false and then click OK

Disable Anti-Phishing: The anti-phishing filter that warns you about fake sites also produces additional writes to the drive.
You can disable this feature by clicking Tools - Options and then selecting the Security tab. Uncheck the box next to "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery".

Disable History: Disabling history at the Options box will prevent Firefox Portable from writing a small bit of data to your drive for every page you visit.

Enable pipelining: If you're using a broadband connection you can load pages much faster by setting network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to true and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 in the about:config window.