HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

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salixious
Posts: 38
Joined: 30. Oct 2014, 08:12

HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

Post by salixious »

Would you like to always have the latest and greatest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser without having to worry about any dependency issues or compiling the source code yourself? Read on...

Inspiration for this how-to comes from The Firefox Lover's Megathread by ivanovnegro over at the CrunchBang forums. ivanovnegro can now be found grilling forum members over at the LinuxBBQ forums.

01. We need to download the latest and greatest version of the Firefox browser from the official Mozilla Firefox home page. If you're running a 64-bit version of Salix, make sure you download the 64-bit version. The file you download is a static portable version of the Firefox browser.

02. If you have installed Firefox from the repos or installed from self-compiled source code, uninstall the existing app.

03. Extract the file you downloaded in step 01. The result should be the creation of a folder called firefox.

04. Move the firefox folder to a location of your choice. Many distros create a Bin/bin folder under your home folder upon installation and this is where I place all of my static portable apps. Salix doesn't create a Bin/bin folder upon installation, but you can create one if desired.

05. I use the Openbox window manager, so I made the necessary entry in the Openbox menu to start Firefox. The command for the Openbox menu entry would be, in my instance, /home/<username>/Bin/firefox/firefox. If you use a true desktop environment like KDE/Mate/XFCE, you'll have to figure out how to make the appropriate menu entry to start Firefox. I'm not familiar enough with any of the aforementioned desktops to provide the necessary information to create a menu entry.

06. Open the Firefox browser and make any necessary changes under Preferences.

That's it. You now have the latest and greatest Mozilla Firefox browser that can easily be updated from within the browser.

A great benefit of using a static portable version of an app is that it can be shared if you multi-boot other Linux distros. In my case, I have a Bin folder on a shared Data partition. For each Linux distro, I create a soft link to the shared Bin folder and then I create the appropriate entry in the Openbox menu to start the applicable app. In the case of Mozilla Firefox, you'll have to configure the browser again for the specific Linux distro you're using.

Finally, since this is a static portable app, you do not have to blacklist it or worry about it getting downgraded.
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gapan
Salix Wizard
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Joined: 6. Jun 2009, 17:40

Re: HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

Post by gapan »

Or you can use this script from ruario to make your own package out of the latest version.

The way you're doing it, you'll have to manually install any plugins like flash separately too. And keep updating them manually...

And to get things straight: what you receive from the salix repos is a most up-to-date version of firefox, it just isn't necessarily the highest version of firefox.
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salixious
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Re: HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

Post by salixious »

gapan wrote:The way you're doing it, you'll have to manually install any plugins like flash separately too. And keep updating them manually...
Flash is installed manually under Debian and updated that way as well, or at least that's the way I've learned it; reference the thread on the CrunchBang forums above.
gapan wrote:And to get things straight: what you receive from the salix repos is a most up-to-date version of firefox, it just isn't necessarily the highest version of firefox.
I guess we have a different definition about the most up-to-date version; v33.0.2 (from Mozilla site) vs. v31.0.2 (from the Salix repo).
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gapan
Salix Wizard
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Joined: 6. Jun 2009, 17:40

Re: HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

Post by gapan »

salixious wrote:I guess we have a different definition about the most up-to-date version; v33.0.2 (from Mozilla site) vs. v31.0.2 (from the Salix repo).
Once again, most up-to-date is not the same as higher version. Firefox 31.2.0ESR (the one we're using, which is not 31.0.2 as you mention) is just as up-to-date as 33.0.2 is (the one you're talking about). Look up what Firefox ESR is.
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salixious
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Re: HowTo: Have the Most Up-to-Date Mozilla Firefox Browser

Post by salixious »

I'll look it up. I've never heard of an ESR version of Firefox. In any case, this doesn't appear to be as easy to do as my experience under CrunchBang. So, I'll take the easy way out on this and use the version from the Salix repos. I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get Flash to work using a portable static version of Firefox under Salix.

I'm glad I didn't put the how-to in the wiki.
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