#1 2017-12-24 21:03:59

BLizgreat!

Resident Babbler - vll!

Registered: 2015-10-03

Posts: 1,217

Installing Firefox Quantum and other newer/older versions of Firefox.

Download it from the Mozilla website, I tend to create and put it in a .dot directory in /home/myusername a dot file/directory is exactly what it sounds like and you already have several, you put a .(dot) before it's name so that it doesn't show up until you unhide the file/directories.

So in my case, I create a directory named .browser in my /home directory. Copy/paste the Firefox download into it and then extract it there. You end up with a directory named firefox. Go ahead and setup a new mozilla profile for it with the Mozilla profile manager. You launch it in run dialogue with "firefox -p" or in terminal with "firefox -p &exit" (note: No quotes) then just follow the instructions on creating a new profile. In my case I just removed firefox-esr last night, so the proceeding instructions don't work anymore but there's also another way to create mozilla profiles and going to type it out here too for the sake of it.

Launch Firefox and in it's address bar ( the place you would enter web addresses to get to a website etc.) type about:profiles in it and it'll take you to a screen where you can also create/remove etc mozilla profiles.

Anyway, so far you've got Firefox downloaded, extracted into a directory ( again I like using .dot directories cause I don't want a folder named firefox sitting in plain view in my home directory.) You've created a new mozilla profile for it to use, name it whatever you want obviously but let's say I named mine newfox. Ok now all that's left to do is add these to rc.xml and menu.xml to launch Firefox. So that's what we're going to do ...

In thunar ( or whichever file-manager you like.) we click our way into, /home/yourusername/.config/openbox and there's the files we're after. So we open them in a text editor and add the path to firefox in them. ie: In rc.xml

<keybind key="Control-Right">
      <action name="Execute">
        <startupnotify>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
          <name>Browser</name>
        </startupnotify>
        <command>~/.browser/firefox/firefox -p "newfox"</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>

keybind key='s is whatever key combo you want to launch Firefox with. In the above I have mine set to launch it when I hold down the Control key and then press the right arrow key(>)on my keyboard. In <command> there it's the path to firefox in my case I extracted the firefox folder to a .dot directory named .browser so that's the correct path to it for me /home/myusername this > ~/ is just a shortcut it translates to /home/yourusername so I don't have to type it out, though you can if you want there, it could just as well be /home/myusername/.browser/firefox/firefox too and I named my new mozilla profile newfox so in the above with the (-p "newfox"), I'm telling it, when it launches Firefox to have it use the newfox profile.

Ok afterwards do the same in menu.xml if you want and then logout/back-in to openbox. Test it by pressing your selected key combo and the menu item in the right-click menu, you're done. Again, you can create a new entry for it or steal the one already in it for the web browser, just replace the path to the firefox folder in it and add the -p "nameofprofile".

Note: Never actually bothered learning how to set Firefox installed via this type of method as x-www-browser. Can think of a couple ways to do it that would almost surely work. It's/Firefox is not managed by the OS's package management software in this case, it's independent of them. Which is both good and bad in ways, I like it fine, it updates automatically from Mozilla if you leave the default settings that way, so there's no lag between when Firefox updates come out and when they get applied, though bad in that it's more a pita to set as x-www-browser.

One trick I've noted is Thunar's ability to open a certain file with a custom command, so ie: .htm, .html etc files, right click on em, lay out the path to your instance of Firefox and the profile you want it to use as in the above, WHAM ... when you click on an .htm or etc file, Thunar launches them with Firefox as ya like.

Vll!

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-24 21:46:36)