upgrade without package manager
The Debian Firefox packages available are only 115.6. Thought it would be nice to have the latest. Grabbed all the dependencies according to the Mozilla web site.
Installed Firefox 121.0 as root and placed folder into /opt, as instructed. Went through all the settings and imported my bookmarks.
Now there is a 121.0.1 upgrade available but my browser won't automagically install the upgrade. Says click here to download. So I do. I get the entire tar.bz2 bundle, which creates a full directory structure, as if I was starting over.
Can I just move a few files from that into the existing /opt/firefox directory to get the upgrade? If so, which ones?
Or, can I move few files from the existing directory into the new version, and replace the whole lot? If so, which ones?
Thanks in advance.
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Hi Scott
You might find this article useful:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/11/firefox-developer-edition-and-beta-try-out-mozillas-deb-package/
Currently this covers Beta and Dev Edition, but I understand that a Release version may follow soon. I used this process to add Developer Edition to Debian 12, seems to work perfectly fine.
If you install Firefox as root, then you can only update if you run Firefox as a root user (i.e. use sudo), otherwise you can install Firefox not in /opt but install in your home directory (~/firefox) and and update Firefox in the usual way via "Help -> About Firefox".
Yes the user needs read/write permissions for the Firefox folder in order to do internal Firefox updates.
If you are the only user then I also suggest to place the Firefox folder in /home directory to keep it simple.
Thanks for all the tips.
I tried to run the browser as root, but did not have permission? It was suggested that users in the wheel group might have better luck. I don't have a wheel group.
As I am not the only user, but am high chief, I changed ownership of the /opt/firefox directory structure to myself. Updated with no problems.
Everyone is happy.
Don't ever run a browser as root.
Installing the flatpak version would be preferable as you get protected binaries and sandboxing.