Upgrading Firefox on a Mac or Windows machine that isn’t shared with others is usually a piece of cake: click on the “upgrade” button that the browser gives you and follow the directions. Upgrading on a Linux workstation, particularly one that is shared by many users, isn’t quite as easy, though it’s not too hard.
As far as I can tell, the Firefox desktop icon on CentOS and Fedora simply launches the “firefox” command in a shell. This means that we can intercept that and replace it with an upgraded version of firefox. In particular, the “firefox” RPM from CentOS installs to /usr/bin/firefox. Here’s the data on an un-upgraded CentOS 6.3 machine:
[root@irwin ~] cat /etc/issue CentOS release 6.3 (Final) [root@irwin ~] rpm -q firefox firefox-10.0.7-1.el6.centos.i686 [root@irwin ~] rpm -ql firefox | grep bin/ /usr/bin/firefox [root@irwin ~] which firefox /usr/bin/firefox [root@irwin ~] /usr/bin/firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 10.0.7 [root@irwin ~]
Firefox 10.0.7 is very out-of-date, so we want to upgrade right away, and we’ll want to keep upgrading as new versions come out.
If you go to getfirefox.com, and click on the appropriate buttons, it will download a .bz2 file to your home directory. Unzipping that file results in a .tar file that create a directory called “firefox” that contains a program called “firefox.” So, do the following:
[root@irwin tmp] cp firefox-18.0.tar.bz2 /usr/local/ [root@irwin tmp] cd /usr/local [root@irwin local] bzcat firefox-18.0.tar.bz2 | tar xf - [root@irwin local] ls -l firefox/firefox -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 96524 Jan 4 19:44 firefox/firefox [root@irwin local] ./firefox/firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 18.0 [root@irwin local] cd /usr/local/bin [root@irwin bin] ln -s ../firefox/firefox . [root@irwin bin] which firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox [root@irwin bin] firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 18.0 [root@irwin bin]
Good. Firefox 18.0 is much better and this last step shows that we succeeded.
I’ve written a script called upgrade-firefox to automate this.
