How to run Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 15.04

These instructions will allow you to run the ancient 3.6 version of Firefox on a recent Ubuntu installation, namely 15.04, but it could apply to versions of Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint released close to 15.04.

The reasons why you might want to run such an old version of Firefox are irrelevant to this post. For me, this solves a problem of very limited scope: having to run some browser tests, written in Javascript as bookmarklets, that only last executed correctly in Firefox 3.6. Those tests access user information that is not available to the Javascript engine in versions of Firefox newer that 3.6, since Mozilla tightened its security and it is not exposing the user's visited history any more.

Now, I suppose I could migrate my tests out of the browser, read the browsing history from some SQLite file in the user's Firefox profile, and simulate the browser with something like Selenium, but I just cannot be bothered.

The guide

  1. Download firefox-3.6.tar.bz2 from ftp.mozilla.org. Decompressing this archive will give you a directory named firefox.

  2. Move the firefox directory in /opt/. The target of these instructions is to get /opt/firefox/firefox to execute without errors.

  3. Trying to run /opt/firefox/firefox now, results in 'library missing' errors for libgtk-2.0-0 and libdbus-glib-1-2. Both these libraries exist in an Ubuntu 15.04 installation, but they are 64bit libraries whereas Firefox 3.6 was only ever released as a 32bit application.

    Both problems are solved by installing the 32bit versions of those libraries:

    sudo apt-get install libgtk-2.0-0:i386
    sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-2:i386
    
  4. Run /opt/firefox/firefox now and you should be able to enjoy the retro experience of times gone by, with no Flash or any other plugin for that matter. A note of caution: running such an old version of a browser is very unsafe. Don't do anything other than testing with it, use a clean profile (run with -P option and create a test profile), and if possible, sandbox the application so that it can't touch anything on your main system.

A note about library paths: Firefox 3.6 looks for libraries into its installation directory (in this case /opt/firefox/firefox), in addition to directories in the library path. Therefore, if you hit an issue where the browser can't locate libraries that exist on the system, it is easier and probably safer to create symbolic links to those libraries in /opt/firefox/firefox rather than altering your library path just to accommodate the needs of this old application.

Enjoy!

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