Hi,
First of all, I would like to apologise if my english writing is no so good, Ive a good excuse : I’m french ! (my accent is probably worse !)
I would like to install Firefox on my L14 laptop, and I found 2 versions of Firefox (Firefox “normal” ? vs Firefox ESR) and different ways to install it.
What would be the right version and best way to install it ?
I found one file on mozilla support (firefox-89.0.2.tar.bz2)…
With the command line sudo apt search Firefox, I had many lines in return, hard to choose from…
And somewhere else, I read it’s possible to install it with a .deb file.
There may be some other ways, so I’m a bit confused and wouldn’t like to learn later that I did a wrong install and should have done differently !
Thank you for helping !
Philippe,
Réunion island
PS : I tried the already installed Web/Epiphany and didn’t find out (it seems impossible) how to install some adds-on of wich I’m used to, some well known such “no-script” (convenient for facebook, google etc.) “ublock” to reduce advertizing, and one “Cesium” to manage my Duniter wallet for libre currency (that is developping, mainly in France for now, if you’re curious see monnaie-libre.fr)
Easy way…
The correct commands to enter in the terminal would be: sudo apt update (and then sudo apt upgrade if there are any new updates to install)
sudo apt install firefox
or/and
sudo apt install firefox-esr
Firefox (the main release) gets many new “features” or “changes” to its user interface on a rapid basis. Firefox-ESR stays mostly static for a longer time, and gets the same security updates as regular Firefox, but without the constantly evolving user interface. At some point in the cycle, approximately annually (?), Firefox-ESR will get all the UI changes that Firefox implemented, but all at once.
There are also other versions, e.g. “Nightly,” which previews upcoming changes, if you want to live on the “cutting edge”…(and bleed a lot).
You can install multiple versions of Firefox on the same machine, but to avoid profile conflicts, make sure you give their folders different names, as, after download, they are all called “Firefox.” To do this, open the Files browser to your Home folder, choose Show Hidden Files from the top menu, look for the folder named .mozilla, open it and then rename, for example, the Firefox folder that corresponds to the ESR version: e.g. name it “Firefox-ESR.” This will keep your Firefox profile separate from your Firefox-ESR profile.
You could instead just make portable installations if you want. There are plenty of instructions on the internet for that.
Thanks a lot for your fast answer ! I’ve just installed Firefox-esr with add-on !
Thanks also for all the details !
I hope your answer will be helpfull to other users !
P.S. If you do install multiple versions of Firefox, and even if you have renamed the folders in the .mozilla file, they may still both appear as Firefox Web Browser in the Main Menu. If so, you can rename them in the menu. In Linux Mint, I right-click on the Main Menu icon to edit the menu, then find the item I want to rename, click on its Properties, and change the name to something distinguishable. I’m sure it’s a similar process in PureOS.