Hello Mark, i'm not familiar with linux, see if the next article is helpful : Install Firefox on Linux and wait another contributor with knowledge for linux to help you more.

thank you

Hello ideato,

Thank you, but no, that article is not very helpful. That's why I submitted this question. I doubt I'll get any help here. For some strange reason, the folks who develop Linux seem to have made it intentionally difficult in many ways, especially for installing applications.

My VBox guest is Linux Mint 14 using a shell that I think is called XFCE. With the loss of my WinXP laptop, I need to update Mint & XFCE, but before that I need to load the FFox & TBird profiles from my old laptop (saved using MozBackup), but before that I need to install the Linux edition of MozBackup here in Mint, but before that I need to update this Linux edition of FFox to v 31esr to match the MozBackup from the Windows edition of FFox. In Windows all that would be rather trivial, but in Linux, it seems to be nearly impossible. When I open the .'tar.bz2' file (an archive known as a tar ball), I can't even recognize an installer program. How I would update the needed system libraries is a total mystery to me.

I think the problem with Linux is that there's no such thing as "a Linux operating system". Instead, there's many Linux operating systems, all mutually incompatible. It appears that even when two people run the same version of Mint, they need different stuff when they update. Installing or updating an application doesn't work unless all the system libraries that the application calls (though system APIs) are there and support that version of the application. In Windows, installers automatically update the system libraries (run time library files that Microsoft supplies with development tools such as C++ MFC) that the application uses. But in LInux there's so many differing and conflicting run time systems that even Linux experts have trouble. Honestly, I don't see Linux as ever attracting very many users.

My alternative is to abandon the idea of running Linux in a VBox all together, and run WinXP in the VBox instead. I don't really want to do that because it might not be safe to do on-line banking with WinXP, but I may have no choice. It all depends whether someone will give me help to get me over the hump and up and running. When I'm running everything in Linux, I'll have time to learn Linux, but until then I need to get stuff done (on-line banking for example). I don't need a hobby right now.

On Linux Firefox comes as a tar.bz2 archive as you can see by the file name. All you have to do to install Firefox is to extract all the files in the archive to a folder on your hard drive. If you do that in your home directory then you do not need root privileges (i.e use sudo or log in as root).

See also:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_Firefox#Linux

Make sure that you meet the System Requirements (GTK+ and GLib) for the current Firefox version.

• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/34.0/system-requirements/

I moved 'firefox-31.3.0esr.tar.bz2' to my home directory. I extracted the contents. Now I have a folder named "firefox" in my home directory, but nothing happened. Don't I need to run some sort of installer?

Thank You.

There is no installer or autopackage or packages like rpm or deb. You just untar and run the firefox script which should be a file named as firefox. You can create a launcher shortcut pointing to this.

There was a so called installer way back during Firefox 0.9 to 1.0.8 releases however it was just a useless extra step and a headach for people explaining how to use it over the much easier simpler tarball.

You can create a launcher to run a startup script or start Firefox directly via ~/firefox/firefox

• cd ~/firefox
• ./firefox