Mozilla Firefox version 6.0 stable has finally arrived. It’s available for Mac , Windows and Linux based distribution such as Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) or 10.10/10.04, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, OpenSuse etc. Firefox 6 has a some new and exciting features, e.g progress bar element of HTML 5.0, which has been already supported by Google Chrome, is now added in Firefox 6.0. So it’s a good news for web developers because they can use ‘progress’ element more effectively.

If you aren’t familiar with the rapid release cycle of the Firefox web browser or other open source projects such as Google Chrome, then you might be surprised and probably worried about the “stability and the pain of ‘version-dependencies problems’ such as plugin compatibility, usability, productivity etc”. Relax, there are some advantage too in the RAD (Rapid Application Development) approach, specifically if you are a tech savvy user; always hungry for exciting and cutting edge features, feel good in trying new things (in other words if you love experiment). These days, ‘frequent version release’ is a common attribute in some popular open source projects e.g Ubuntu and many other Linux based distributions such as Linux Mint, Fedora etc, Firefox, Google Chrome…

How to Install Firefox 6 on Ubuntu 11.04/11.04/10.04.. or other Linux based OS

#1 Download the Firefox 6 package (firefox-6.0.tar.bz2), close all the Firefox windows/tabs.

#2 Next, extract the file and execute the script (either by right click extract here followed by dragging the ‘firefox’ script from the extracted directory to the terminal or through the command).

tar -xf firefox-6.0.tar.bz2
cd firefox
./firefox

#3 That’s All. Have Fun with Firefox 6.0.

firefox-6-on-ubuntu 11.04

New features in Firefox 6.0

progress-element-in-firefox 6Firefox 6 has some new and exciting features, along with a lot of bug fixes, improved speed and stability. The performance of Firefox has not been admirable (probably due to frequent crashes and slower browsing experience) on Linux platforms such as Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10 or other ‘older versions’ or distros such as Linux Mint, Open Suse. In fact Firefox has continuously loosing its usage share on Ubuntu. One of the most exciting feature is ‘support for the HTML 5.0 – progress element’, which can be used to indicate the progress of a task. Other features includes ‘lower launch time’, improved performance on Linux/Ubuntu etc.

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3 Comments

  1. jessie@Mumsie-netbook:~$ tar -xf firefox-6.0.tar.bz2
    tar: firefox-6.0.tar.bz2: Cannot open: No such file or directory
    tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
    jessie@Mumsie-netbook:~$ ‘/tmp/firefox-6.0.tar.bz2’ 
    bash: /tmp/firefox-6.0.tar.bz2: Permission denied
    jessie@Mumsie-netbook:~$ 

    I tried both doing the command line version & then, when that failed, dragged the tar pkg into the terminal window. Did I misunderstand something? Kinda feels like I did …

    I should mention that when I d/l the FF file, through the FF browser, & despite having my Prefs set to d/l to Downloads in my home dir, the tar pkg ended up in my /tmp dir of my System dir.

    Reply

    1. you must go first to the folder where you placed firefox-6.0.tar.bz2 after downloading it. By default it be in the Downloads/ folder, so you just need to execute cd Downloads/ before executing the tar command

      Reply
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