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
Please do tell us about how you like Firefox Quantum or you can also send us your queries using the comment box below.
If you think we have helped you or just want to support us, please consider these :-
Connect to us: Facebook | Twitter | Google Plus
Donate us some of you hard earned money: [paypal-donation]
Linux TechLab is thankful for your continued support.
Good job, I followed all these steps without any error messages and all it did was open firefox 56. yay. Thanks for trying.
Did you try restarting browser ?
Nevermind, Sorry! I closed out of firefox and reopened it. Now it’s firefox 57. Thanks!
Thanks!
Why not just add the official ppa instead of going entirely outside of your repos and package manager?
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-security/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Yes you can do that, but what about CentOS/RHEL and other Linux distributions. Not all have official repositories.
This method works for all.
You could just install arch linux – its a rolling distribution and has already updated firefox to version 57. And this is without using any ‘experimental’ or third party archives.
Yes you can, but i doubt that most people will not be willing to do so just cause of a browser, which can be installed easily.
You can just unpack it in $HOME/bin/firefox and it will work after you make a few minor config changes – not a good choice for a system with multiple users,but fine for a system that only you use. This also makes it simple to roll back to FF52.5 ESR when you decide that is a good idea, by just renaming two directories.
NoScript is a disaster in 57 – and I don’t blame the guy that develops NoScript for the situation at all. If you need NoScript, wait a month or two to install FF57.
FF57 also inexplicably fails to save pages from certain domains, every time. So, expect that, too.
That’s another way to do it.