Firefox 3.1 beta on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

  I have been testing Jaunty for a few weeks now and I like everything but the intel graphics. ( that is another story). This week I decided to try the new firefox. 

  The first thing I did was download an addon called 'Nightly tester tools". It can be downloaded from here.  This addon will allow your firefox extensions to remain compatible with the beta version of firefox even though the addon is not designed for it. I should warn you now that your current addons may fail with the beta version of firefox but, I think you can expect that if you are running beta software.  I did find firefox 3.1 beta in the ubuntu repositories and I quickly installed it.  Clearly this was not the way to go. None of my extensions or themes worked and the back button was greyed out.  Multiple crashes every few minutes. As far as I was concerned, this was not even alpha software.

  Next I went to the firefox website and downloaded the beta from there.  I un-tared it to my home folder with

tar -zxvf firefox-3.1b3.tar.bz2

  The contents are now in a folder called firefox in my home directory.  Inside that folder is a file called firefox.  Double clicking this file will launch the new firefox. You can create a link on your desktop to this firefox file or just browse to the folder and double click if that works for you. When you first start the new version your extensions will be checked.  Chose the option to override all compatability.  This will ensure that your plugins and themes will still work.

  I have been using it on both my work pc and my laptop at home and so far everything is very nice. It seems to be much faster that firefox3.0 and very stable too.

  As always... Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Comments

[Daneken]

I also run Jaunty with Intel Graphics and had several problems until I upgraded the Kernel to Linux kernel binary image for version 2.6.30-ultimate. This allowed Compiz-Fusion to run extremely well. I have not been able to find a way to stop Package Manager from trying to revert the kernel (apt hold does not work and lock version - may work, but wont stop PM from trying to download old kernel).

This may work for you - I used KernelCheck to locate and compile Ultimate Kernel.

[Drew]

I am also eager to try the new 2.6.30 kernel but I think I will wait for Karmic koala. I think I may install it sometime in august if all of the reviews are good at that time.