Mozilla stopped distributing zipped builds of Firefox quite a while back. Since then it’s become difficult for the casual users to try new releases without installing them first. However, if you have downloaded the Firefox 4 installer, you can actually try out Firefox 4 without installing it. Just follow the below steps:

1. Use 7-zip to extract the installer into a directory of your choice.
2. Inside the extracted files, you’ll see three folders: localized, nonlocalized and optional.
3. Copy the contents of all these folders to a single folder (if prompted to overwrite, choose “Yes”).
4. Now you can double-click on Firefox.exe to start it.

Bonus Tip: Want to run Firefox 4 with Firefox 3.6 simultaneously? Here’s how:

Set an environment variable named moz_no_remote and set its value to “1″ (name and value both without quotes). Additionally create a shortcut to Firefox 4 with the “-p” argument appended to the end of the command. That should let you create a new profile specifically for use with Firefox 4 so that your main profile is left untouched.

Also if you want you can download optimized Firefox 4 zipped builds from the Blazing Fast Firefox download page.

 Tweet