How to Use Firefox 5 on Linux/Fedora 14

Firefox 5 has officially released yesterday, do you want to experience the new features?

New Features:

1. Support CSS animation which makes various web page elements display on computer screen correctly. It will do help to more dynamic web pages development and network applications developments.


2. Firefox new plugin SDK (called Jetpack before) enables program developers use more network technologies when programming, such as HTML, CSS and Java, etc. It can simplify the developments of Firefox plugins and prevent the replacement of the new and the old form interrupting.

3. Add-on Builder is in the rest phase and this can make plugin development easier.

4. Firefox antitracking technology is available on Android platform now.

5. Canvas can add up 2D image technology to Browser so as to ensure the browser a fast running speed.

6. It supports Web Open Font Format on Android platform currently.

The biggest advantage of Linux - open source, also is the biggest disadvantage, for this results in a lot of distributions which are not totally compatible with each other. So here I'll take Fedora 14 (the Linux system I'm using) as example to tell about how to use Firefox 5 on Linux.

The latest Firefox version for Fedora is Firefox 3. And because of the software management of Linux, the newest Firefox versions are not availalbe in the first pace. So we'll need to handle this ourselves.

How to use Firefox on Linux/Fedora 14:

Step 1: Download Firefox 5 from Firefox FTP.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/5.0/linux-i686/

Step 2: Unpack the downloaded Firefox 5 file.
The file you downloaded should be in *.tar.bz2 format.
Upack it: tar -xjvf *.tar.bz2

Step 3: Then you'll get a file folder named "firefox".Move the whole folder to "/opt"

Move: mv /home/yourname/download/firefox /opt

Step 4: Create a shortcut to "/opt/firefox/firefox"

Then you can use Firefox 5 on your Linux now.


Tips:
If you have read this post carefully, you may ask what about the default installed Firefox 3? I suggest you don't remove Firefox 3 from your Linux, or the newly created Firefox 5 shortcut will have no icon.