Update Firefox on Ubuntu

For some strange reason, I couldn't open and see content of any of my yahoo mail using Firefox. I tried it on Chrome. It was working. So it must be something to do with Firefox + yahoo combination. Since I cannot fix yahoo from its setting (it doesn't even open), I in turn focused on fixing Firefox. Anyway I checked my add-ons and plug-ins and found nothing suspicious. So I decided to update my Firefox. I found the version from Help->About Firefox. The version was 20 and there was NO update button/link despite of all the articles on the net saying so. Next I ran

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --purge --reinstall install firefox

Hoping the system will find the updates in the repositories and update Firefox for me. Nope. Firefox was not updated. So I had to do it manually. Here are the steps:

1. Get a Linux 64-bit copy from here and untar/uncompress it.

~/Downloads$ tar xvfj  firefox-28.0.tar.bz2
tar: Record size = 8 blocks
firefox/
firefox/libsoftokn3.so
firefox/chrome.manifest
firefox/mozilla-xremote-client
firefox/crashreporter.ini
firefox/libnspr4.so
firefox/updater
.
.
.

2. Backup your $HOME/.mozilla directory if you want to be careful.

$ cd; cp .mozilla .mozilla.bak

3. Close all Firefox instances.

4. Backup your firefox directory

$ sudo mv /usr/lib/firefox /usr/lib/firefox.bak

5. Move firefox directory you just uncompressed to /usr/lib

$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/firefox /usr/lib

6. Now give it a try by launching it from the launcher or command line.

$ /usr/bin/firefox &

7. One more step, the firefox.png file seems to be missing from the latest Firefox 28 package. You will see a big red cross if this is not done. So to properly show firefox icon in your launcher.

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/firefox.backup/icons/mozicon128.png \ 
/usr/lib/firefox/icons

8. Try yahoo mail again. It works!

9. Now you can delete all the backups if everything works as expected.

In a fairly good mode, so toss in a bonus tip - to open a file with the default application in command line:

xdg-open /usr/lib/firefox/mozicon128.png