I recently had an issue w/Ubuntu updating to the latest version of Firefox. For some reason all the releases of Ubuntu I’ve tried (Dapper, Edgy and Feisty) are packaged with Firefox 1.5. I haven’t researched too much into it but I vaguely remember reading something about licensing. Before I upgraded to the latest release, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have any deprecated versions cluttering my hard drive. So below are instructions on a manual install of Firefox that removes all traces of old versions while retaining the previous versions bookmarks, plugins, etc…

First, go here to get the latest Firefox release.

After downloading, open up your favorite terminal and enter the following 3 commands:

tar -xzvf firefox-CURRENT_VERSION#.tar.gz
sudo mv firefox /usr/local/
sudo ln -s ../firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/


That’s all folks!

Because /usr/local/bin is before /usr/bin in the default user PATH shell variable you don’t have to modify your default Firefox icon on the Gnome launch toolbar. The default Firefox launching shortcut points to the “firefox” command so it will the “/usr/local/bin/firefox” before the packaged “/usr/bin/firefox” command.

Definitely try Firefoxes’ own update mechanism located under the Help menu first. If that doesn’t work, the above will fix you up.