Play Day

 Today I had a lot of "maintenance" things to do so while they are running in the background I'm taking time to "play" and catch up on reading. I've decided to play with a few of the portable web browsers and sandboxie to see how I like them and if I think they would be worth using and reccommending to some of my friends and consulting clients. Here is what I played with today: Firefox portable, torpark, Opera (It's not portable, but I haven't used it before) and Sandboxie

I'll start with firefox portable because it was the one I liked the best. It was easy to install and I was able to import my favorites and other settings with no problem. Even after shutting it down and restarting it all was well. No settings seemed to be lost. Now this may not be the best for pure privacy, but I can tweek it plus it does keep most of my browsing data off the hard drive.

I'm not overly crazy about torpark. It works OK if you disconnect from the tor network, but that kinda defeats the purpose. From the hard drive it ran OK, but even that took a couple of days. At first it rarely connected to a web site and then it was like using a 14.4 modem. I had to try it on 2 USB keys before it would ever connect and it was way too slow. I would have to be fearful of my life and ID to use it when there are other options.

I heard about sandboxie not long ago and decided to try it out. It seems to do a pretty good job of keeping stuff off your system. I ran Firefox, Thunderbird, and Yahoo IM in it and none of them seemed to mind at all. I did have trouble trying to do things like email an article from a web page and copy and paste. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on then I remembered sandboxie. Those are slight inconvenienced that I could live with.

I also decided to give opera a try. I've heard lots of good things about it and was not disappointed. I haven't decided to give up firefox for it, but I will keep playing around with it. Two things that I would like to see. If any of you know if this is available I'd love to know. I would like to be able to open multiple tabs at startup like firefox and I would like to be able to have a "no scripts" type of plugin for it.