Page 1 of 1

Keeping old Firefox ESR along side new Firefox ESR?

Posted: 10. Oct 2018, 04:28
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?

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

Posted: 10. Oct 2018, 05:54
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.

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

Posted: 10. Oct 2018, 06:38
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)

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

Posted: 12. Oct 2018, 07:57
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