Firefox, Ubuntu and Ubuntuzilla

I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 at home and was a bit bummed to realize that I wouldn’t get the newest Firefox 3.5 version until the next major Ubuntu release. While there are certainly a few clever “hacks” to get around that, I tripped over one today that seems pretty slick.

The project is called Ubuntuzilla and does some cool stuff:

[…] a python script that allows the user to install the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla SeaMonkey, and Mozilla Thunderbird on Ubuntu Linux. It also works on other Linux distributions that are derivatives of Ubuntu.

Getting Firefox 3.5 on jaunty seemed like a great reason to try this script. So I did.

The installation instructions are dead simple and in no time at all I had 3.5 installed and loaded. Unfortunately, it couldn’t actually find any web sites. All internet apps on the machine worked except for Firefox. All settings looked good but no amount of my fiddling could get it working.

I heaved a sad sigh and uninstalled the whole works.

Turns out I should’ve checked the Ubuntuzilla support forums first. I just found a topic with what appears to be the solution.

If anyone else has this problem type “about:config” into the firefox browser.
Then use the filter (on the top of the screen) for ipv6.
The first value is “network.dns.disableIPv6″ double click on “false” to change it to “true”. (this disables IPv6 support in Firefox.)

I’ll start over tomorrow and try that fix. Stay tuned…

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