Ubuntu Firefox Fubar

[Charles Curley]

For those who haven't upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (or "Hungry
Hippo", as Brad Rodriguez puts it,
http://www.goodbyemicrosoft.net/news.php) yet, this may save you some
grief.

HH comes with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5. First off, why in the name of Murphy
did they put a beta on HH (however you expand the acronym)? Given
Ubuntu's reputation for stability, isn't that rather silly?

The upgrade will stomp on your existing FF 2.x installation. I used
the Alternate CD, and it gave me no option here. I also have a number
of extensions, two of which I use daily for work. Those two are broken
on 3.x, mozex and gmail notifier. I use both a lot. Also, 3.0 mungs
your extensions such that they are broken if you downgrade to
2.0.0.14.

I believe the workaround is: Do *NOT* launch FF 3.0. Immediately go to
Synaptic and search on FF. Install those FF 2.0 packages that are
analogous to those FF 3 packages already on the system. Then, in a
separate operation, remove the 3.0 packages. This should leave your
.mozilla directory intact. Then make a symlink so that program
launchers can find it.

root at dragon:~# which firefox-2
/usr/bin/firefox-2
root at dragon:~# cd /usr/bin/
root at dragon:/usr/bin# ln -s firefox-2 firefox
root at dragon:/usr/bin#

Note that I haven't tested this yet.

If you've already run FF 3.0, you may need to re-install your
add-ons. One thing you can do, rather drastic, is shut down FF, and
run:

find ~/.mozilla -iname extension* | xargs rm -r

and start re-installing. That line will wipe out all your extensions.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Looking for fine software       \ /    Respect for open standards
and/or writing?                  X     No HTML/RTF in email
http://www.charlescurley.com    / \    No M$ Word docs in email

Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0  809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://plug.org/pipermail/plug/attachments/20080503/cebdd182/attachment.pgp