348. Using the official firefox 19 binary on debian testing/wheezy

UPDATE 20/3/2013: installing a system from scratch I'm having issues with xulrunner-10.0:i386, since it pulls in libstartup-notification0:i386 which causes all sorts of headaches (uninstalls xulrunner-10.0 and everything it depends on)

This post made me realise that installing the pre-built firefox binary isn't as straight-forward as one might like. A small nuisance is that the getfirefox.com versoin is only 32 bit, but that's life.

Here we go.

Download the standard binary version of firefox from here:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?from=getfirefox

You can install it wherever you want, but I'm going for a local installation. Put the firefox-19.0.tar.bz2 in your home folder and untar it:

tar xvf firefox-19.0.tar.bz2
cd ~/firefox/
./firefox

If you get

bash: ./firefox: No such file or directory

then you are missing 32 bit compatibility libraries:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
sudo apt-get install xulrunner-10.0:i386

To get flash set up you'll need the 32 bit version. Download the 32 bit version from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?no_redirect

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins -p
mv ~/Downloads/install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz ~/firefox
cd ~/firefox/
tar xvf install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz
cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

And that should leave you with a working firefox versions. Note that running 'firefox' as a command will invoke iceweasel if installed. To get around that you can e.g. do

echo "alias ffox='$HOME/firefox/./firefox'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

after which you can launch firefox by running ffox form the terminal. A standard installation would be to put everything in /opt and set up a .desktop file -- but there's plenty of guides to how to do that.