Installing/upgrading Firefox in a Linux environment

This is pretty simple, but I wanted to write up how to install/upgrade Firefox manually, in a Linux environment.

First thing that was tricky is, where is the "proper" place to install it? There is much debate on this point still, but I believe that installing to the /opt directory seems to make the most sense.

So we've downloaded the Firefox version we want to install:

[text]firefox-7.0.1.tar.bz2[/text]

It is sitting in a directory:

[text]/home/tim/downloads/[/text]

I open up a terminal and type:

[text]sudo tar -jxvf /home/tim/downloads/firefox-7.0.1.tar.bz2 -C /opt/[/text]

What is this command? Let's break it down:

• sudo - "The following commands we are going to run as super user", necessary for putting things in the opt directory.
• tar -jxvf - The tar program is what can compress and uncompress archives. We are using the options jxvf
  • j - the compression method that was used is bzip2
  • x - We are going to be extracting the archive.
  • v - We want the output to be verbose, so we'll see every file extracted.
  • f - We are going to tell it the file to extract.
• /home/tim/downloads/firefox-7.0.1.tar.bz2 - The full path to the Firefox archive we are going to be installing.
• -C /opt/ - We want to specify the directory /opt/ as where it is going to be extracted to.

Then, bam Firefox should be extracted to the /opt/firefox directory. Then what do we need to do? Well, depending on your Linux distribution, you need to add a shortcut to that to your menu somewhere, so it's easy to get to. The program the shortcut should point to is:

[text]/opt/firefox/firefox[/text]

UPGRADE: For upgrading your Firefox install you have in the /opt/ dir, you do the exact same thing. :)

Now I don't have to spend the 1 min remembering how to do this every time a new version of Firefox comes out. Hope it helps others.