Change preferred Internet application

Support & Help Requests
1

I have both Firefox and Seamonkey installed.

But for Firefox, I had to use an older ESR version because an addon will not work on newer versions. That version is in it's own directory and was not installed using Ubuntu.

I would like to have Firefox as my preferred Internet App, but Seamonkey is the only pick.

Is there a workaround?

Thanks.

2

Hi fixit,
Don't know how you install your ESR version, but if you want to use another firefox version it's possible to use it through wine. Also is possible use some older versions in 64bit wineprefix using Playonlinux, including usual portable versions. I have and older 50.0 firefox folder portable version, and it works quite fine; I complete reset it when something is wrong. It's an option. Remember that using older versions means security and stability issues, depending what you want to do.

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3

I think there's an interpretation issue here. What @fixit7 probably meant to say was Firefox wasn't installed from Ubuntu's repositories, but rather from a third-party repo or with apt using a .deb file. Not that he was using Firefox for a different platform than native.

So uhm, more details about the issue on-hand would be nice @fixit7. I believe the easy fix for this, if you are using Firefox ESR for your primary system instance (of which i presume is Ubuntu MATE for your OS) is to begin use in a live session, mount your primary system instance and copy from live session the instance of firefox.desktop from /usr/share/applications into your primary instance's directory of the same path.

Your primary instance should mount in /media unless you modify it in /etc/fstab or use tools which modify /etc/fstab like gnome-disks. If you unfamiliar with what partition your system is held in, /etc/fstab within your primary instance viewed using a text editor will provide you this information, which you can then use in your live session instance to follow the above advice.

You may have to modify the .desktop file so its exec and tryexec lines reflect what Firefox is actually called. After, you should be able to select it in Preferred Applications and use as defauilt browser for everything.

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4

You can get the ubuntuzilla firefox-esr-mozilla-build here.
https://sourceforge.net/p/ubuntuzilla/wiki/Main_Page/#installation

This will give you the official repositories for the ubuntuzilla build of Firefox, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird and Seamonkey. I have used these for years with no problems. While Gmail will block the default Thunderbird in the Ubuntu Mate repository as unsecure, the ubuntuzilla build will work. Firefox ESR is also now sandboxed, so you can have both Firefox, and Firefox ESR on your system and they will not share add-ons and bookmarks.

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