I found Firefox 3.5 Shiretoko today in the Ubuntu repositories. You can either choose the files in your package manager (Synaptic in Ubuntu) or install from the terminal. To use your package manager, be sure to refresh the package list before proceeding. The required files for the Gnome desktop are:

firefox-3.5
firefox-3.5-branding
firefox-3.5-gnome-support
xulrunner-1.9.1
xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support

For Kubuntu, just leave off the two gnome support files. If you select firefox-3.5, it will account for its own dependencies, but you should make sure that the list above is complete for the installation. You can also do this quickly with terminal commands:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-branding firefox-3.5-gnome-support xulrunner-1.9.1 xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome-support

Firefox 3.5 will install along side version 3.0.11, so I recommend installing 3.5 first, get it up and running, then uninstall 3.0.11 once you’re happy.

When you first run Firefox 3.5, it pick up your existing profile and will check all your extensions. All my major ones like Adblock Plus, NoScript, Popup Blocker, Perspectives, MR Tech Toolkit, etc., made it, but some others did not. TabMix Plus required downloading the latest build. I was able to find replacements for most of the few lost extensions. More on that later.

That’s all there is. Firefox 3.5 fired up with only one serious problem – all my search engines were gone! That’s fixable, but I will put the answer in the next post so folks can find it quickly.

When you’re confident in Firefox 3.5, you can uninstall 3.0.11 by either selecting it for removal in your package manager or from the terminal. The packages to uninstall are:

firefox
firefox-3.0
firefox-3.0-branding
firefox-3.0-gnome-support
ubufox

That’s all you can uninstall. If you try to uninstall xulrunner-1.9, it will try to uninstall a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to lose. This can be done quickly from the terminal:

sudo aptitude remove firefox firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-branding firefox-3.0-gnome-support ubufox

The last two aren’t loaded in Kubuntu. Synaptic also uninstalled sun-java6-plugin in the process. When I tried to reinstall sun-java6-plugin, Synaptic wanted to install Firefox 3.0 again. Hmmm. No big deal, because I also have icedtea java’s plugin installed. I’ll have to look into the sun java issue later.

UPDATE: Later came in this post.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with Firefox 3.5 yet, but it’s easy to tell that it loads much faster than 3.0. Can’t really tell if it loads pages or javascript any faster yet. Overall, very cool so far.