If it aint broke, don't fix it...

Such simple words for such an important statement.

Managing the Firefox executable in Linux (my install of SuSE 9.3, I should say) is fairly simple. One just opens up File Manager as root, and then navigates to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and copies lib for a backup (I leave the backup in the same directory, but name it with the Firefox software version at the end, such as lib2.0.0.16). This works fairly well. Step one done: a backup of the current version of Firefox has been made.

Next, take the new Firefox tar.gz file, decompress it. I keep mine in /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/*latest version of Firefox*/, so I went to /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/firefox-3.0.1/ (still in super-user mode in my file explorer) and opened up the one folder in there, "firefox" - so very simple and benign. Things were looking good.

Inside "firefox" is the core application of firefox and firefox-bin and all it's core "Firefox centric" files, like chrome and whatnot. Do a "select all" and then copy all the files.

Continuing on, (once again, still in super-user mode in my file explorer), and paste the contents of the folder firefox into /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and permit an over-write of the files in there. It'll over write of the files that need to be updated, while maintaining anything special that one already has in there.

Update of MozillaFirefox is now done.

Note: This is more complicated than the Windows version of this update, and far more difficult than the very simple Mac version of updating software. However, backing up ones installation of Firefox is much simpler in Linux than in Windows. It is about the same to backup ones programs in Mac OS though

Now, just click on your usual Firefox icon and the browser starts.
~or, at least that is the theory.

* * *
One may get: nothing at all.

I thought, "Perhaps I didn't click it..." - so I clicked it again. No dice.

~sigh, it must be some strange error. I fired up Konsole and navigated to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and executed firefox, which returned:
daniel@Suzi-lnx:/opt/MozillaFirefox/lib> ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

All I could think was " f r e l l . " (see references in the American Sci-Fi show Farscape) I was looking down the long slope to dependency hell, which has been known to on many occasions to cause serious over-hauls of the system's software, and on some rare major cases, reinstallation of the OS itself. I wasn't about to go down that route unless I was really aware of what I was doing, that meant research time.

Since I didn't have an operational Firefox, I chose to use Opera to google up some results, I chose to use firefox 3 suse 9 error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file as my search "tearm" (if one can call such a long string like that a "term") and found some results. The first result was pretty spot on, ./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at the Firefox Support Forum. Page 2 [.link] is even more useful. This second page informed me that there was a work around for this issue on good 'ol mozillaZine (my most trusted site for Mozilla application troubleshooting). The article I was told to look up is Firefox 3 on CentOS 4?

The results were pretty poor however. Install Firefox 3 though a package manager. Upgrade your pango libraries by hand. Use wine and run the Windows version of Firefox instead. Upgrade your OS - maybe it'll have Firefox 3 preinstalled.

The worst line: "It's probably not recommended, but here's one way."

Even though the post moderator has the best intentions, I find it hard to go to such extremes.

I think for now, I'm going to let FF 3 in Windows and Mac OS, and I'll work on upgrading it after work-arounds for this pango issue become well documented.

For those of you who are in need of the link to the old Firefox software releases, see Mozilla Firefox 2: Download Firefox 2.