Debian 7.3 wheezy does not come with Firefox but Iceweasel installed as default. Iceweasel is a rebranded of Mozilla Firefox due to trademark issues. Iceweasel is supported by debian and Firefox is supported by Mozilla Corporation. However if you want to install Mozilla Firefox on debian 7.3 wheezy, I’m going to show you how in this article.
The newest version of Mozilla Firefox is 27.0 as of I’m writing this article. Firefox 27.0 comes with Firefox SocialAPI that let you run more than one social bookmarking services like Delicious, indian Music service, at the same time and integrate directly into Firefox. The integration will let you access to the latest social happening easily without open or create new tabs.
Download Firefox on debian from Mozilla website, 32 bit and 64 bit are available.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/
Assume you download the firefox-27.0.tar.bz2 file to /home/username/Downloads directory.
Change current working directory to Downloads directory
$ cd ~/Downloads/
Decompress firefox-27.0.tar.bz2 file
$ tar xjf firefox-27.0.tar.bz2
Now you can remove firefox-27.0.tar.bz2 file since we no longer need it.
$ remove -r firefox-27.0.tar.bz2
Next step is to move the new firefox directory that you just decompressed from firefox-27.0.tar.bz2 file to /opt why /opt? Most external programs will be install in /opt directory by default.
$ sudo mv firefox /opt/
Now you can use firefox after you have done those steps above. To start firefox, you can type in firefox in your terminal
$ firefox
If you cant launch when you type in firefox in the terminal, you might want to create a shell script to launch firefox
$ cd /home/username/ $ nano firefox.sh
with the content
#!/bin/sh export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/firefox/firefox /opt/firefox/firefox/firefox-bin
save that shell script as firefox.sh, after that make that shell script executable by running chmod command
$ chmod +x firefox.sh
You now should be able to use firefox by using the shell script by running
$ ./firefox.sh
Or you can install Firefox on debian 7.3 wheezy by using Linux mint’s debian import repository
Edit sources.list file
# nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Add this line to your sources.list file
deb http://packages.linuxmint.com debian import
Now you can install Firefox
# apt-get update && apt-get install firefox
