Those of you using Debian will know that this distribution comes with Firefox ESR pre-installed. The following post is for those who have updated to the latest version of Firefox (57), replacing ESR.
If you don't know how to do it, there is a very good tutorial on the linuxconfig.org
Installing Firefox manually has its pros and cons. The pros are that you will have the latest and fastest version of Firefox. The downside is that all future updates will have to be installed manually, as Apt won't do it.
The above tutorial from linuxconfig also contains the commands for upgrading to a new version.
However, because executing commands with every Firefox update may not excite you, below we will create a script that will act as the update tool.
It won't be like Debian's package manager, but it can ensure that downloading and installing the latest version of Firefox will be a breeze.
To get started, you will need to become root by typing the su command in your terminal.
so
Enter the root password to proceed.
Then, using the Nano text editor, we will create the script in usr/bin of your system.
nano /usr/bin/firefox-iguru
When the blank nano screen opens, add the following text by copying and pasting.
#!/bin/bash wget -O FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US" tar xjfv FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2 -C /opt/firefox/ --overwrite rm FirefoxSetup.tar.bz2
The 4 commands above notify the system that this is a script (#!/bin/bash), download the latest version of Firefox with wget, open the compressed files, and replace the files of the older version with the new ones (overwrite). Immediately afterwards, they delete the compressed file since it is no longer needed (rm).
Immediately after that, use the following command to provide what is needed in the script you created
chmod +x /usr/bin/firefox-iguru
You're ready, when you see a new version of Firefox released, you can run the commands below and the upgrade will be done automatically.
su firefox-iguru
Be careful, the script only works for manually updated versions of Firefox, as done with the linuxconfig.org tutorial, mentioned above.
