As scheduled, Firefox 24 has been released, for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, bringing improvements and new features.
Among others, Firefox 24 comes with a new feature called “Close tabs to the right”, that enables the users to close all the opened tabs from the right side of the current one, with only one click.
For a full list of improvements, see the official changelog.
In this article I will show you how to install Firefox 24 on the most popular Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux and many others.
There is no repository yet for Firefox 24, so we have to download the archive from the official site:
For 32 bit systems
$ cd ~/Downloads
$ wget -c ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/24.0/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-24.0.tar.bz2
For 64 bit systems:
$ cd ~/Downloads
$ wget -c ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/24.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-24.0.tar.bz2
Extract the downloaded archive:
$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ tar -xjvf firefox-24.0.tar.bz2
Move the extracted Firefox 24 directory to /opt
$ sudo mv ~/Downloads/firefox /opt/firefox24
Make Firefox 24 your default web browser, with this symlink:
$ sudo ln -s /opt/firefox24/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
Optional: To launch Firefox 24, just type firefox 24 in your terminal. Or create this alias for a better usage (this alias will keep the Firefox session alive when you close the terminal):
$ alias firefox24='nohup firefox24 &>/dev/null &'
