@geo_c :-
Heh. It's an approach I've taken for several years. I have several directories; "my-documents", "Downloads", "Mike's-Stuff", "Movies", "Media" (this one is images and music, mostly), "Puppy-Stuff", etc., all situated on a partition of what used to be an external USB 3.0 'data' drive. Since moving to the new HP desktop, I ripped the HDD out its plastic casing, disconnected the USB 3.0-to-SATA 'bridge' card that these external drives all seem to use, and installed it permanently within the tower via a normal SATA port.
These directories then all get sym-linked into /root of any new Puppy I set up.....giving me common access to all this personal data, regardless of which Puppy I happen to be in for the day. And if I happen to switch Puppies at any point - for whatever reason - I can just carry on uninterrupted. The idea is not new - folks have been doing this for years before I ever tried it - but Puppy's easy-to-use & powerful sym-link function makes it very easy to implement.
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Same goes for the browsers. I've been a Chrome man virtually since it was in the beta testing stage in Summer of 2007. I was on XP in those days, and had long since switched from Internet Exploder to Firefox.....a move many Windoze users had made. Around the time Chrome was being developed, Firefox was in the middle of an "awkward" spell; it was very crash-happy, often shutting-down whenever it felt like it, and was also suffering from horrendous memory leaks. I was ready to throw in the towel, I was getting that fed-up with it, when I spotted an advert, inviting people to become beta' testers for the upcoming Chrome browser. "Sod it", I thought, and signed-up almost straight away. And boy, was I glad I had. It was blazingly fast; rock-solid, and very stable in use, extremely clean & tidy in appearance, and showed every sign of developing into a world-beater. Which of course, it HAS.
I always used to use the Chrome 'sync' function, but was never too happy with the concept of all my data being on somebody else's servers. With Fred's initial development of that first 'portable' Firefox, it spurred me on to try and take the concept further. Pale Moon was the first, followed by an ESR Firefox. I was happy with these, and turned my attention to the Chromium-based browsers. These proved more awkward, initially, but with plenty of help from various members of the community we "cracked it". Opera became the first, Chromium-based Puppy 'portable'; then Iron, followed by several others. Interestingly, Chrome was almost the last to be given the 'portable' treatment, despite it being the one I'd always wanted to get working initially.
The rest, as they say, is history. What I like about the portable browsers is the ability to "share" a common profile between multiple operating systems; effectively, it's a way of "syncing" your browsers, while at the same time keeping all your data local. And it works.....very nicely!
Mike. 