www.enkognedo.com

Linux Today produced a very interesting article recently regarding which browser is the buggiest.  I couldn't tell you for sure which one is the buggiest and I use FF 3 regularly and mostly Google Chrome when I'm at work - provided I can find the plugins for them.  Rarely will you find me using IE of any version at home or work.  Take for instance right now, I'm using FF 3 (3.0.5) while writing this article, but I have Google Chrome open on my other display looking at the main www.enkognedo.com screen (not logged in).

I've preferred Firefox for sometime now, but have run into a couple hurdles with it lately.  Take for instance my recent attempt to install FF 3 on a Debian system.  I didn't have a lot of initial luck and the process was far from straightforward.  I didn't read much about the reason it is like this, but did happen upon an article saying something about Mozilla and their EULA preventing the linux distros (or maybe just Debian - not sure) from including FF 3 as part of it.  Not sure - so don't hold me to it.  Regardless, the process of getting it to work was quite involved.

I had to update my GTK to 2.10 or higher.  This is the message I received when I installed and ran Firefox 3 prior to updating my GTK:

We're sorry, this application requires a version of the GTK+ library that is not installed on your computer.

You have GTK+ 2.8.
This application requires GTK+ 2.10 or newer.

Please upgrade your GTK+ library if you wish to use this application. 

Here's a nice link explaining what happens and what needs to happen to correct the GTK/Firefox issue. Now you think you're good to go... Oh not so fast!  You need to download many development libraries.  Here is another link giving a more detailed approach to making this installation work.  I didn't install everything this guy did, but You'll need most of them, so I'd go ahead and install those first.  You'll need to download the latest library sources of Cairo, ATK, GLIB, GTK, PANGO, and (if you're using a Debian based system) PIXMAN - not sure if other distro require it or not, but I had to install it because of dependency issues with getting Cairo setup.

I've used Linux for YEARS - off and on - among them SuSE, Ubuntu, RedHat, Debian, Slackware, and several others.  I have fallen short of fully adopting Linux for the very reasons I cite in this semi-tutorial.  There simply isn't a clear path to follow with anything "Linux".  There are a multitude of caveats due to what distribution of Linux you're using, what you already have installed, etc... 

You'll need to download the above packages and install them. You migt do the apt-get install for some of these, but it is recommended to download the source and compile them from source to the designated directory of choice.  The libcairo2-dev install below is not recommended.

sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev

If you're running this from a /root/ terminal, you don't need to specify "sudo". You'll also need to apt-get build-essentials and pkg-config to allow the ./configure part to work properly.  If you don't have something, you'll certainly be presented with a message on your screen saying it was looking for a "C compiler" for instance, so then all you need to do is get one!

The main thing is just to get everything as source and compile the installation to the directory you wish to house your new library files.  I put all of mine in /home/matt/opt/gtk214, but that's up to you.  I ran out of hard drive space when I tried to install all of this onmy /opt directory from root.  I guess I should have allocated more space to the partition with the /opt folder, but that would be too much to expect from me.

Now get (git) these two:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/cairo

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/pixman 

Once you have all of your library sources downloaded, do an ./autogen.sh --prefix=/YOUR_PATH_HERE/  first on the pixman source and then one on the cairo.  If you get errors, just pay attention to what it is asking you for - likely a dependent package which you'll need to install.  Download and install it accordingly.  Then ./configure --prefix=/YOUR_PATH_HERE/ for your remaining GLIB, Pango, ATK, and finally GTK source libraries.  The "--prefix=" parameter passes your library path to the installation.  If you're doing this properly, you're designated library folder will begin to have new files and folders within it.

With each successful ./configure..., you will then need to do a "make" and then a "make install".

If for some reason, you are unable to get a ./autogen.sh to succeed, simply run "make clean" and start with fresh with a ./configure --prefix=/YOUR_PATH_HERE/.  Once you've completed all of this, you can create an executable script to set the library path for your new Firefox 3 installation - this is shown at the link I provided above. Good luck and please let me know if you have troubles.  I know I did and I know this explanation is less than complete.  My biggest issue was just getting all of the dependent files install prior to compiliing all of the source and doing so in the correct order.  This will likely be your biggest issue, too.