July 1st saw the release of Firefox 3.5. You must already be aware of what is new is version 3.5 and what makes it the awesome-est browser to-date, if not check this Firefox 3.5 preview video and the feature list for Firefox 3.5.
In this post we are going to walk you through installing Firefox 3.5 in Linux (no installers for Linux 🙁 ). We’ll be doing it on Ubuntu 9.04, but it will work the same way on other Linux distributions too.
Step 1 is to download Firefox 3.5 tarball from the Firefox site. Extract the Firefox 3.5 files from this tar ball and move them to an application directory of your choice. Anything like /home/user/apps/firefox35 (we will use this path as example in this post) or /usr/apps/firefox35 would work fine.
Step 2: Now since you already have Firefox 3.0.11 (or previous) installed, we will not be able to upgrade the older version with the newer version. So, we will create a new profile so that we can safely work in the Firefox 3.5 environment. To do that, create a launcher for the Firefox executable with the -P switch. The command section of the launcher will look something like: /home/user/apps/firefox35/firefox -P
Step 3 Run this executable now, Firefox 3.5 will start with the “Choose User Profile” option. Create a new profile and start having fun.
Do note that not all addons have been migrated to Firefox 3.5 yet, so you might have to miss out on some of your favorite addons for a while. Also, you will have to export your saved passwords and other configurations in the new profile (checkout addons that help you do that or else you will end up doing it manually).
If in case, even after creating a new profile you end up with Firefox 3.0.11 (or your previous version) use the –no-remote switch in your launcher. This switch helps by creating a completely new instance of Firefox, instead of connecting to an existing instance. Using this switch, then, you can keep both your old Firefox version and the sparkling new 3.5
Have fun and do share your firefox 3.5 experience.
