Here’s a simple howto on running several different versions of Firefox in Ubuntu 9.10. This is the setup that I use to test my jQuery plugins and other JavaScript code — I hope some of you fellow developers out there will find it useful too. The basic advantage of this solution is that is does not clutter your basic system with unnecessary software packages, as all the additional files are stored in your home directory and nowhere else.
I’m going to create a directory where all the different Firefox versions will reside. I have a dedicated directory for any software that I can’t or don’t want to install the standard way (using apt), and it is located in my home directory – /home/michal/opt. It serves a similar purpose as the system-wide opt directory, which is intended for “optional” software.
$ mkdir /home/michal/opt/firefoxes
There it is. Now, I’m going to get all those versions of Firefox that I want to run. As of this writing, the version running in my system is 3.5.7. I decided to also install the latest version of the 3.0 series (3.0.17), the prehistoric 2.0.0.20 release, as well as the freshly released Firefox 3.6.
Actually, according to browser usage statistics (such as those run by Clicky and StatCounter), Firefox 2.0 has a market share below one percent, so it’s questionable whether web developers should still care about it. I just happen to like to see if new versions of my jQuery plugins still work in the older browsers, so I’m going to install it.
Binary packages for all Firefox releases can be downloaded from the Mozilla FTP server at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/. Here are the respective URLs for the versions that I’ve chosen:
- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.20/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-2.0.0.20.tar.gz
- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.17/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0.17.tar.bz2
- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.6.tar.bz2
So now I’ll go to the firefoxes directory and download the three packages with wget (of course, you can also download them using your browser or any FTP client):
$ cd /home/michal/opt/firefoxes $ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.20/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-2.0.0.20.tar.gz $ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.17/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0.17.tar.bz2 $ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.6.tar.bz2
