I have faced this issue that no article or no forum shows correct way to install firefox on debian based distros, or maybe I haven't found such article, but anyways I figured out myself.
Step 1
Download your desired firefox browser.
Step 2
Extract firefox tar file and it should give you the internal firefox folder in your downloads folder.
Step 3
Now to move that extracted firefox folder to /opt directory.
sudo mv ~/Downloads/firefox /opt
Step 4
Now to create firefox's .desktop file in user's applications directory
cd ~/.local/share/applications
You can name your firefox desktop file anything like I have installed firefox developer addition, so my file name is firefox-dev.desktop. But you can name it anything which is relevant.
touch firefox-dev.desktop
nano firefox-dev.desktop
Inside this file my configuration is something like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox
Name=Firefox Developer Edition
Icon=/opt/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
Comment=Custom definition for Firefox Developer Edition
Terminal=fasle
Note:
- You can see that location to execute firefox is in out
/opt/firefoxpointing to firefox executable file. - Icon for out firefox will be found in given location, you can choose any set of icons, whichever suits your need.
Top comments (3)
Yeah so firefox is not available from apt package manager. In my previous company we were all using firefox and since then i have habit of using firefox only, but I couldn't learn how to install firefox back then, only knew how to force update an existing one
It seems like the OP wanted to install Firefox Developer Edition (FDE) instead of a standard Firefox. And sadly, FDE isn't provided by its official distro repository. Hence, I did it in Fedora as well.
Debian comes with Firefox ESR which is too boring and slow. And I always wanted to install firefox by myself successfully but never found legit help online. This is the way i found. I hope you found it helpful.