Upgrading Firefox on Linux

For a long time I was running Firefox version 1.0.4 on my Linux system. All versions prior to 1.5 has some limitations and drawbacks. There is no automatic update. It is decidedly less secure and with less features. So I wanted to upgrade it to the latest stable release. I had tried it in the past, but I could never get it working. That is one of the problems / pain points while working with Linux. It does not have a user friendly Add/Remove programs applet to remove programs. Since Linux is a file based configuration, you have to update certain files to make things work. The key is to know which files should you upgrade. And for a Linux newbie like me, it turned out to be momentous task that took 3 days.

Honestly speaking, I had tried upgrading Firefox before also when the v1.5 first came out. And I had failed. I mean, I could extract the tarball but I could not run the application. It always used to give me an error related to libstdc++.so. Being a newbie, I could not make heads or tails of it. This time also I faced the same issue. I searched on the internet and found out that this is a dependancy error and the file libstdc++.so needs to be reinstalled / re-linked for this thing to work. To do that I had to first find out which package owned this file. The command to find that out is:

$rpm -qf libstdc++.so

This gave me the name of the rpm package that I should update; glibc*.

With that information in hand I proceeded to update the file with

$su yum update glibc*

This updates the library containing the file. Once this is done, I can then launch firefox from command line after navigating to the actual folder but not through the default shortcuts that I have on the panel and Applications --> Internet menu. I thought by deleting the existing firefox folder in /usr/bin will do the trick, but unfortunately it does not do it. It broke my browser and I could not launch firefox from the button.

I right-clicked and looked at the properties of the shortcut to find out the application that runs firefox and it said "htmlview %u". I open the htmlview script file and checked for places where firefox might be referenced. Nothing.

I then searched for files named firefox in the filesystem and I did find one in /usr/lib. I tried running it and it gave me an error which referenced the old firefox directory firefox-1.0.4. That lit a tubelight in my mind and I open the firefox script file and read through it. Sure enough it referenced default browser as residing in /usr/bin/firefox-1.0.4 at line 180. I modified the line to reference it to the new location /usr/bin/firefox/firefox and the browser started working again.

Which leads me to thinking what will a non-technical person do if he / she has to jump through these hoops? Is there a better way of doing the upgrade? The answer to these questions will be critical if we want more people to adopt linux as their primary operating system.