Sometimes we need to run older versions of Mozilla Firefox in order to overcome compatibility issues with other software. For an example of these situations, see this post.
Download
You can download older versions of Firefox from this page. If you need a particular version and you can’t find it there, you may try constructing the download URL yourself. For example:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5.9&os=linux&lang=en-US
Will download Firefox version 3.5.9 for Linux in English. You may modify these three parameters to get any other version.
Run
Unpackage the tarball and run firefox:
$ tar jxpvf firefox-3.5.9.tar.bz2
$ ./firefox/firefox
Troubleshooting
If you get the following error when executing firefox:
$ ./firefox
./run-mozilla.sh: 399: ./firefox-bin: not found
$
Then you probably need to install some libraries to support running 32 bits applications:
$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
Enjoy!
Great post! after 2 hours of googling, finally i was able to downgrade firefox
thanks a lot!
DANG! Talk about a life savor……I’ve been trying to get 3.5.9 working on 10.04 for over 2 hours with that exact error. Thanks!!
Thanks a lot! After wasting almost 2 – 3 hrs i found this. Was of g8 help.
Gracias, también se puede descargar versiones viejas de Firefox de http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html.
Saludos!!
Thankyou! It might also help someone to know that you can get all the old versions from the firefox http://ftp... ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
great… I successfully installed older version of Firefox.
Holy cow, this page saved the day for me. Ever since Mozilla went crazy and tried to copy Google’s update scheme, I have been having endless problems with Firefox. Now, thanks to you, I can revert back to stable versions and stop the madness of all these Firefox updates. I would like to sincerely thank you for posting this information.
Also, lets hope that the Mozilla team will someday soon realize the error of their ways. Firefox was once a great browser and it could be again! They (Mozilla) need not copy Google Chrome and focus on how things were before when Firefox was the undisputed greatest browser in the world!
Cheers!
Boy do I agree with Joe above
No, they will NOT realize, Cheryl. They will go the way of Gnome 3 (that switch ppl to KDE and XFCE), Ubuntu Unity (that switch ppl to Linux Mint) and other snob pricks, who knows better than users, what users wants.
Let’s face it, the months of Firefox are counting down.
Thanks a lot! It works for me on Ubuntu 12.04.