Debian 9 - Install Latest Firefox

Debian 9 will install Firefox 52 which does not have all the major speed improvements that came with Quntum.

If you wish to dramatically improve the speed of Firefox, you will need to run these steps to manually install a later version.

Steps

# Download and extract the latest version of Firefox
wget -O FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US"
sudo mkdir /opt/firefox
sudo tar xjf FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 -C /opt/firefox/

# Create a backup of the original firefox debian shipped with
# and create a symlink to the new firefox
sudo mv /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr_orig.bak
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox/firefox /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr

You should now have Firefox 59 or later (check by clicking Help > About Firefox)

Future updates

Unfortunately, since we just manually downloaded Firefox rather than using the package manager, we will not recieve automatic updates. To update firefox, simply re-download the latest version again.

wget -O FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US"
tar xjf FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 -C /opt/firefox/

Revert Back To Debian's Firefox

unlink /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr
mv /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr_orig /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr

References

• LinuxConfig.org - How to install latest Firefox Browser on Debian 9 Stretch Linux