Mozilla released Firefox 57 aka Firefox Quantum on 14th November, 2017, though it was in Beta for quite some time but a official release was provided. Firefox quantum is said to be the fastest version of firefox till date. It is said to be 2 times faster than firefox was 6 months ago & uses 30% less memory than its competitor, Chrome. Less memory usage means faster page loading & smoother browsing experience for users.

Mozilla has built the UI & underlying browser engine, called Servo, completely from ground up. All these new enhancements will make firefox faster to load and render pages, and also its user interface should be quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.

In this tutorial, we are going to discuss how to install Firefox Quantum on your Linux machines. Though official repositories on Ubuntu & CentOS etc will eventually provide the update but if you are not willing to wait for the update, you can use the following tutorial to install Firefox Quantum right now. This process is same for & has been tested on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, CentOS & RHEL.

(Recommended Read: How to install Tor Browser on Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS) )

 

Install Firefox Quantum

Firstly we will download the Firefox Quantum from the Official Website HERE. Once the file has been downloaded, it can be located under ‘Downloads’ folder. Extract the file using the following command,

$ tar -xjf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2

We should now have an extracted folder named ‘firefox’. We need to move the folder to ‘/opt’ but before moving there make sure that there isn’t a previous version of firefox there, if there is remove it & copy the new extracted firefox folder with the following command,

$ sudo mv firefox /opt

Now, we will create a soft link to launch the web browser from terminal. Execute the following command to create the soft link to Firefox Quantum,

$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox57

So now we can launch firefox from terminal with the following command,

$ firefox57

But if we want to make it our default browser & open it like we open Firefox normally through menu or shortcut, than we need to remove the old soft link & add the new one. To do so, firstly move/backup the old link,

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-backup

& than simply create the new link,

$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

That’s it, we can now launch the Firefox Quantum from menu or through terminal with following command,

$ firefox

install firefox quantum

Please do tell us about how you like Firefox Quantum or you can also send us your queries using the comment box below.

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