So as it turns out there’s a reason everyone talks about syncing Firefox’s bookmarks but not its history, tab sessions, or saved form and passwords data. At least, insofar as portable apps are concerned. And this has a lot to do with the nature of flash memory thumb drives.

PortableApps.com recommends turning off pretty much everything I’ve come to rely on in my Firefoxing experience. Under “Improving Firefox’s Performance,” they say,

[I]t helps to realize why things are slow. 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. When this happens, Firefox Portable can appear to “freeze” or “hesitate” momentarily.

So, in the interest of reducing the amount of time spent writing to disk, they recommend setting Cache storage to 0, turning off all the History options (visited pages, form data, downloads), turning off password collection, and disabling session restoration and the “undo close tab” option.

Dude, those are the things that make browsing painless! “What the heck was that web site I visited the other day?” The History sidebar knows! “Ah, damn, I was in the middle of a blog entry and I accidentally closed the tab.” Recently Closed Tabs to the rescue! “I haven’t been here forever–what disposable e-mail address did I sign up with?” Hooray for password storage! (Remember to safeguard ‘em all with a Master Password, though.)

The same goes for Trillian. I like having chat logs. They’re handy. They mean I don’t have to be constantly grabbing the mouse, copy-pasting, taking notes. But it’s recommended to turn ‘em off when “portable apping” so as to minimize writing to disk.

But even if I were willing to put up with the frequently software pauses (and I am!) there’s another very important reason to minimize writing to disk:

Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. Mid-range flash drives under normal conditions will support several hundred thousand cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive to run application software or an operating system.

This means that every session state Firefox records, every visited web page it remembers, every time Trillian saves my chat log, hastens the end of my thumb drive’s useful lifespan. No thank you.

Which leaves me with a sort of compromise between plan A and plan B: mainly run off my laptop, it being as portable as they come, but back up my profiles to the thumb drive and use it to run apps whenever I need to work off a desktop computer. The more infrequent use of the portable software will make up for my having turned back on all those write-heavy functions I love.

And here ends, for now, my educational foray into the world of portable apps.