Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

General talk about packaging procedures and packages.
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DrCR
Posts: 58
Joined: 30. May 2014, 05:14

Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

Post by DrCR »

I recently upgraded to the new Firefox ESR package, and I've realized there's a few outlier situations where I need the old 52.9.0 ESR available in addition to the new Firefox ESR package. Any insight on how I could go about this? My duckduckgo foo is lacking me at the present, and the packaging realm of Linux in general has persistently been beyond my ken. Should I forget packaging and just install the binary from Firefox's webpage?
DrCR
Posts: 58
Joined: 30. May 2014, 05:14

Re: Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

Post by DrCR »

Update: Not sure if this is the right approach, but to start I extracted firefox-52.9.0esr.tar.bz2 to /opt and did a ln -s to /usr/local/bin. It appears I now need somehow tell it to not just simply default to ~/.mozilla.
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gapan
Salix Wizard
Posts: 6236
Joined: 6. Jun 2009, 17:40

Re: Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

Post by gapan »

That approach is fine.

Now, you'll need to start the 2nd firefox (not your main one) with the --no-remote option. Also use the --ProfileManager option to set a different profile for your 2nd firefox, the first time and then use the -P <profile> option to launch the 2nd firefox with that profile. Example script:

Code: Select all

/opt/ff52/bin/firefox --no-remote -P ff52
(I haven't tried any of that but it should work)
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DrCR
Posts: 58
Joined: 30. May 2014, 05:14

Re: Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

Post by DrCR »

That did the trick.

I created a script in /usr/local/bin, rather than having a symlink, so those --no-remote -P ff52 arguments could be passed in by default.

Many thanks
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