Why would you want to use a beta of Firefox when you an have a more stable release? The version that comes with Breezy Badger has a bad memory leak - and 1.5 runs faster.

I started using Ubuntu 5.10 as my desktop about a week before it hit the final release state. At first, I didn’t have any problems with it and it had a small and fast footprint. Then I noticed that the version of Firefox released with the Ubuntu desktop came to a standstill and I couldn’t live with it.

One of the editors at O’Reilly reported having a similar problem. So, I decided to see how Opera worked. Turns out I liked Opera. It didn’t freeze on me and it has a nice feel.

Unfortunately, Opera doesn’t integrate well with Google and Gmail in particular. So, I started looking at what people had said about the new Firefox 1.5 beta2. I saw a lot of praise. Now I had to install it on this tightly built Ubuntu desktop.

Here’s what I did (with the help of a howto on the Ubuntu Wiki - see below):

First, I used synaptic package manager and added libstdc++5

I then downed downloaded firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz

I didn’t want to chance confusing my apt database. I usually install non-deb packages into /usr/local or /opt. I Installed firefox 1.5 to the /opt directory. First, I copied the downloaded tar.gz file to the /opt directory as superuser.
sudo cp firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz /opt/
cd /opt
sudo tar xzvf firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz
sudo rm firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz

Complete How to