Upgrading to Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu Linux

I have a few OSes installed on my machine. But Ubuntu is the main distribution I use to do most of my work and Ubuntu breezy has included the web browser firefox 1.0.7 with it. One grouse I have about Ubuntu is the quality of the Firefox web browser bundled with it. I am not talking about the version number. But using firefox in Ubuntu has been a real bad experience. The browser is such a memory hog that at times, it has crashed on me when I am in the middle of sending an email. Also it doesn't render the fonts properly for certain web pages.

So I decided to find ways to upgrade the web browser to the latest version 1.5.Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repository doesn't yet have the latest build of this web browser and I had to search for other ways to upgrade the web browser.

That was when I came across this walk through at wiki.ubuntu.com . The basic steps outlined there for upgrading to Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu breezy are as follows :

• Install libstdc++5 library. Ubuntu breezy has a later version (6.0) of this library and firefox 1.5 requires the earlier version.
• Download the firefox 1.5 package from the official Firefox website and unpack it into the /opt directory. (Usually this is all that is required to get firefox 1.5 running). But for greater integration with other programs as well as importing your bookmarks from the earlier version of the web browser, some additional work has to be done.
• Link to your plug-ins
• Rename your old profile in your home directory leaving it as a backup.
• To ensure that firefox 1.5 is the default browser, modify the symbolic link using the dpkg-divert command.

Now you have the latest version of firefox for Ubuntu. For people using other Linux distributions, after unpacking the firefox into the /opt directory, you may include the path in your $PATH variable. Earlier when I was using Fedora, I used to unpack any software I want in the /opt directory and then include the path to the directory containing the binary in my .bashrc file.