How to install the "real" Firefox on Debian Squeeze

[stevepusser]

I have done exactly as described here.
Still,clicking on the icon 'Firefox" opens a new instance of Iceweasel 3.5.16 !

I recently installed Debian 32-bit OS.
Regards and thanks,
Shrinivas

Where is the icon you are talking about? In the menu? Usually that points to a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications, and that's a text file that can be edited, and the "Exec" line changed to the actual binary or launcher script you want to run.

[shrinivas]

I have done exactly as described here.
Still,clicking on the icon 'Firefox" opens a new instance of Iceweasel 3.5.16 !

I recently installed Debian 32-bit OS.
Regards and thanks,
Shrinivas

Where is the icon you are talking about? In the menu? Usually that points to a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications, and that's a text file that can be edited, and the "Exec" line changed to the actual binary or launcher script you want to run.

Hi, the icon is Alt+F1>Applications>Internet>Mozilla Firefox.
I am a newbie, pray tell me how to " line changed to the actual binary or launcher script you want to run" ? Actually, in properties, it shows that
" /usr/bin/firefox %U ". Probably, I have to uninstall Iceweasel to make it work. (I am not likely to do it, because I installed Iceweasel 4 and had some problem of stability.)
Regards.

[craigevil]

All I do is download, extract, create a desktop shortcut, then copy the desktop.file to usr/share/applications so it shows up in the lxde menu.

My Firefox desktop.file (all I did was copy the iceweasel file and change the exec and icon lines, and of course the name.)

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[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Firefox
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
X-GNOME-FullName=Firefox
Exec=/home/craig/Downloads/firefox/firefox %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/craig/Downloads/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;
StartupWMClass=Firefox-bin
StartupNotify=true

No need to mess with extracting to /opt or /usr/local , I just keep it in my /home

Takes less than 2 minutes to have the REAL Firefox this way.

[realnubnut]

Yes getting and maintaining the real thing is so easy thats why I do it. A little script goes a long way.

Takes less than 2 minutes to have the REAL Firefox

I clocked less than a minute. true story

[stevepusser]

When you install Debian's Iceweasel, it creates a "Firefox" symlink that points to the Iceweasel launcher. This is to satisfy some programs that only look for Firefox, so /usr/bin/firefox will still launch Iceweasel if it's installed. So like craigevil says, put the full path to your Firefox launcher script in the .desktop file.

[shrinivas]

All I do is download, extract, create a desktop shortcut, then copy the desktop.file to usr/share/applications so it shows up in the lxde menu.

No need to mess with extracting to /opt or /usr/local , I just keep it in my /home

Takes less than 2 minutes to have the REAL Firefox this way.

I did install using your guide, it went well, but each time I open either Firefox 4 or Iceweasel, it checks for extension-compatibility, so takes some time.
Should I uninstall Iceweasel , or use only one of the two, please guide me. As told earlier, I am a noob, so please bear with me !
Regards,

Shrinivas

[eric1959]

Run them with different profiles....
e.g.

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firefox -P 

create different profile, do so for both and create shortcuts that look like this

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firefox -P "profilename" -no-remote

and you can run them side by side...

[craigevil]

Create separate profiles by opening:

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iceweasel --profilemanager

Then choose Create.

Then either have the profile chooser open each time or point firefox to the correct profile.


I have Iceweasel 4.0 and Firefox 3.6.16, as well as a clean firefox test profile.

[shrinivas]

Create separate profiles by opening:

Code: Select all

iceweasel --profilemanager

Then choose Create.

Then either have the profile chooser open each time or point firefox to the correct profile.


I have Iceweasel 4.0 and Firefox 3.6.16, as well as a clean firefox test profile.

I am sorry for asking dumb questions.
I have created a new Iceweasel profile, but how to or where is profile chooser ?
Regards and thanks
Edit: I am really dumb ! I got it to work, thank you and regards !

[weedeater64]

There is one big drawback : firefox from mozilla website is not configured with --enable-system-cairo , so fonts are not rendered in a proper way...
Better : http://debian-bits-and-snips.blogspot.c ... ueeze.html
or : http://debian-bits-and-snips.blogspot.c ... -4-rc.html

That has been the problem with iceweasel for as long as I've known about it, a bit over 5 years. Poor rendering, that is. Haven't had a problem with firefox. Of course it's other reasons that have lately been pushing me to other browsers, such as chromium, uzbl-browser, conkeror... like that..

[vbrummond]

I have been running Iceweasel 4 with this method on Squeeze. Works awesome and the fonts look great (I use Droid Sans):
http://mozilla.debian.net/

[eric1959]

Create separate profiles by opening:

Code: Select all

iceweasel --profilemanager

Then choose Create.

Then either have the profile chooser open each time or point firefox to the correct profile.


I have Iceweasel 4.0 and Firefox 3.6.16, as well as a clean firefox test profile.

I am sorry for asking dumb questions.
I have created a new Iceweasel profile, but how to or where is profile chooser ?
Regards and thanks
Edit: I am really dumb ! I got it to work, thank you and regards !

if you've used iceweasel before without any profilemanager, you will have one profile ( default user ) already. Look inside ~/.mozilla/firefox. There is a folder ********.default.

Starting iceweasel with :

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iceweasel -P

will start the profilemanager. Let's say you create a profile test, then a folder ********.test will be created in ~/.mozilla/firefox

Inside ~/.mozilla/firefox there is a file profiles.ini with a description of the two different profiles.

You can run iceweasel with both profiles simultaneously by running :

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iceweasel -P "profilename" -no-remote

so in this case that would be

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iceweasel -P "default" -no-remote
iceweasel -P "test" -no-remote

Make appropriate shortcuts in the menu.

[TonyT]

FYI, there is a FF 64 bit:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/relea ... ux-x86_64/

It works as it should along with Flash 64 bit.

[kedaha]

Just to reply that, as an exercise (I always use Iceweasel ), I rolled my own firefox deb. New users should refer to other posts in the present thread if they wish to install "the real firefox" because this howto isn't definitive; there are other ways to create deb packages (see especially this topic), it can take a really long time, specially on slower machines and internet connections and is pretty heavy on memory usage and resources.
Assumes the required packages (there may be others) are already installed including:

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# aptitude install automake autoconf build-essential checkinstall libtool pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev intltool libxml2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnotify-dev libglib2.0-dev libevent-dev mercurial libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libxt-dev libiw-dev mesa-common-dev autoconf2.13 yasm

[/size]
Downloaded the firefox source from here
Extracted the tarball to home directory thus:

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user@squeeze:~$ tar xvjf firefox-4.0.source.tar.bz2

This creates a directory called mozilla-2.0
Create a .mozconfig file in /home:
I just did ALT+F2, selected gedit, cut and pasted a few minimal options to the file:

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. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-opt
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter
ac_add_options --enable-cpp-rtti

I'd be interested to hear any views about the best options to include in .mozconfig.
Then saved the file as .mozconfig
After that:

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$ cd mozilla-2.0
$ user@squeeze:~/mozilla-2.0$ ./configure && make 
$ user@squeeze:~/mozilla-2.0$ su
Password
root@squeeze:/home/user/mozilla-2.0# checkinstall

This creates a .deb package, named (in my case) mozilla_2.0-1_amd64.deb which is automatically installed and thus available in Synaptic. It can be found in the mozilla-2.0 directory. The .deb package can also be installed using gdebi.
All the files will be found in /usr/local.
Firefox can be started with the command firefox or /usr/local/bin/firefox and may be added easily to the Gnome menu.
For further information, please see this link.

[eric1959]

I'd be interested to hear any views about the best options to include in .mozconfig

ac_add_options --enable-system-cairo

Otherwise fonts look crappy...

[friarath]

Sorry if someone mentioned this already but Firefox has a native x86_64 build here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/f ... eases/4.0/
and it seems to work allright.

For me the bookmark toolbar buttons stop working after a while so that is annoying. I am looking into Opera and SRWare Iron right now.

[Lou]

I'm not too bright when it comes to these things, but i try my best

I downloaded Firefox 4.0.1 from mozilla.org to my /home, extracted it, clicked on the new folder till i got to the executable then copied the path to my ratpoison keybinds, restarted rp, got out of the Xs, went back in and it worked. FF4 is great, faster...

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bind f exec ~/firefox-4.0.1/firefox/firefox

Made FF4 my default browser and hoped for the best, i wonder if i will get updates...
Kept iceweasel for my wife, she likes it better

[milomak]

Made FF4 my default browser and hoped for the best, i wonder if i will get updates...

my experiences are that you have to do the updates manually

[Lou]

my experiences are that you have to do the updates manually

I'm happy to report that the update was automatically, using now FF 5.0

[craigevil]

My Firefox Information

Last updated: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 05:06:56 GMT
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

Extensions (enabled: 17, disabled: 3; total: 20)

• Adblock Plus 1.3.8
• BeeFree 2.1.34 [disabled]
• BetterPrivacy 1.51
• ChatZilla 0.9.87 [disabled]
• CoLT 2.5.1
• FlashGot 1.3.0.1
• Google Toolbar for Firefox 7.1.20110512L [disabled]
• HTTPS Finder 0.69
• HTTPS-Everywhere 0.9.7
• InfoLister 0.10.4a1
• Konquefox 1.7.5
• MafiaaFire Redirector 0.6b
• Movable Firefox Button 1.3
• Nightly Tester Tools 3.1.7
• NoScript 2.1.1.2rc5
• OptimizeGoogle 0.78.2
• Oxygen KDE Options 3.1
• PDF Download 3.0.0.2
• Stylish 1.1.2
• Torbutton 1.3.3-alpha

Themes (3)

• Default
• Firefox B [selected]
• Oxygen KDE [selected]

Plugins

• Adobe Reader 9.4
• DivX Browser Plug-In
• Google Talk Plugin
• Google Talk Plugin Video Accelerator
• Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
• Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0_26
• mplayerplug-in is now gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.9.2
• OpenOffice.org Plug-in
• QuickTime Plug-in 7.6.4
• RealPlayer 9
• Shockwave Flash
• Windows Media Player Plug-in