Installing Firefox on Solaris Unix

Mozilla releases Firefox for Windows,  Mac OS X, Android, iOS for iPhone and Linux operating systems but the popular browser is also ported to Solaris by Sun/Oracle internal developers.

Here, I’ll describe steps for a quick test install on a Solaris 10 machine. You can copy the Firefox file to whatever directory you specify. I used /usr/lib for testing this version without overwriting my current version of Firefox.

Install as root.

sunbox#  pwd

/usr/lib

sunbox#  cp /home/testuser/firefox-10.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-sparc-tar.bz2 .

sunbox#  bzip2 –cd firefox-10.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-sparc-tar.bz2 | tar xf –  (use tar xvf if you want to see the verbose output)

sunbox#  cd firefox

sunbox#  ls –l | more

firefox

sunbox#  ./firefox & (to start this install of firefox)

[1] 342

sunbox#

Firefox for Solaris can be found here (pkgadd versions):

Firefox 19.0.2 is now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.

Firefox 18 is also now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.

Firefox 17.0.1 is now available for Solaris at unixpackages.com.

Update 12 September 2012

Firefox 15 is now available for Solaris Unix

Update 19 July 2012

Firefox 14.0.1 is now available for Solaris 10 at the new Sunfreeware link:  http://unixpackages.com/packages/mozilla

Both pkg and tar files are at the new link.

or Firefox for Solaris (tar versions):

ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/mozilla/

Be sure to choose the correct file for your Solaris OS and platform. (OpenSolaris, Sparc, i386, etc.)

The latest version of Firefox ported to Solaris is 10.0.1 which is the latest version of Firefox for other platforms as of this writing (20120214)

In the world of Unix, as in life, there are many paths that lead to the same place. There are numerous ways to perform the same task in Unix, Linux, OS X and sometimes Windows. This is just one.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Browsing!