I’ve been running a firefox 3.0 pre-release build for ages now, and finally thought I’d upgrade – (it turns out) mozilla do not provide 64 bit binaries. The i686 build that you can download from getfirefox.org does not work on my debian amd64 system – but not everything is lost.
As I’m a developer, I’m reasonably happy to play with nightly builds – and so – http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ has what I need – today its firefox-3.1a2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2.
Unziped into my non-debian firefox dir, and runs seemingly fine, except that the firefox addins won’t run, as they are scared of firefox versions that they have not been tested on 🙂
That too can be solved – edit the application.ini file, and replace the Version=3.1a2pre with Version=3.0.1 or whatever the release is that your addons are willing to work on.
so far, only VMWare’s addon won’t run – perhaps I need to set the Version lower, as it worked on Minefield 3.0pre.
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=iceweasel&searchon=names&suite=testing§ion=all tells me that 3.0.1 is in amd64 debian testing since July 2008
VMWare’s addon to give console access won’t run in the 3.0.1 debian version either – talk about disappointing. The 3.1 nightly build seems to feel faster too, so I suspect I’ll be running that most of the time, and will look to migrate away from VMWare over time.