Alot more people seem to be trying Firefox 3.0 with F11 due to various issues with Firefox 3.5 bundled with F11 or perhaps needing to use a 32-bit browser for the Java plugin for things like Juniper Networks VPN which uses proprietary 32-bit code, so I thought I'd throw together a quick howto.
1) download firefox from mozilla.com and extract the tarball where appropriate, I put it in /opt, so the firefox directory is /opt/firefox
2) 32-bit plugins (on both i586 and x86_64 Fedora 11 installs) for the default firefox are located in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. These plugins can be symlinked into the firefox directory or copied into /opt/firefox/plugins
If flash is installed from the adobe yum repository, it will be linked in and the above procedure will install flash plugin. If the flash plugin is not, you can download it manually from adobe, and extract it wherever you want and make sure the libflashplayer.so is either linked or copied to /opt/firefox/plugins
3) for java plugin, install the 32-bit jdk download from
http://java.sun.com. Java 6 update 14 is the current latest plugin. I install it into /opt/java/x86 but you can put it wherever you want. Symlink [JAVA_HOME]/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so to /opt/firefox/plugins/javaplugin.so (naming it javaplugin.so instead of libnpjp2.so will make it easier to remember that this is the java plugin.
The above 3 steps will take care of installing firefox and getting the plugins set up. The next step is key or else flash will crash the browser every time you try to view a flash object:
4) you MUST remove at the very least, the following libraries from /opt/firefox. Either move them to a separate directory, rm them or rename to file.so.old or something:
libfreebl3.chk libnss3.so libnssutil3.so libsmime3.so libssl3.so
libfreebl3.so libnssckbi.so libsoftokn3.chk
libnssdbm3.so libsoftokn3.so
The reason why is glibc 2.10's libcrypt.so is now dependent upon nss for various functions and the version provided with firefox is not compatible with the installed libcrypt.so. However, fortunately, fedora's provided nss libraries are fine. Since nspr is another set of libraries that fedora provides that firefox isn't particular about, i did the same for libnspr4.so libplds4.so libplc4.so but the last 3 are not strictly necessary.
This step must be repeated EVERY time you upgrade firefox as a new firefox update will fail to apply incrementally because the files are missing, and then download the entire browser again and install it thus restoring those files.
5) Once this is done, you can add /opt/firefox/firefox to your gnome menu using the menu editor, or make it your default browser or do whatever you want to make sure you can easily launch it (or just run /opt/firefox/firefox from your shell
note: if you are running x86, in theory all the required third party libraries should exist, but if you install your own flash, libcurl is a library that is often times missed. If you are running x86_64, you MUST make sure you install all the 32-bit (i586) libraries for nss, nss-softokn-freebl, nss-mdns, nspr and any other 32-bit dependencies that the 32bit firefox, java, flash, or whatever third party plugin prompted you to need to do this requires.
Hybrid Mode
