Install Firefox 4.0 Stable from PPA

At long last, Firefox 4.0 is now officially with us. It's been a long while, a ton of Alphas, Betas and any other Greek character you can think of, but it is now ready for everybody to enjoy... So why wait?

Given that Firefox is hugely popular and that there are lots of posts about this recent release and its installation already available, I wasn't thinking of posting about it. However, and probably as a result of such information overkill, I realized the whole installation business was starting to get confusing, specially if one was trying to install Firefox from a PPA in Ubuntu or any of its derivatives.

For those of us who were trying/testing Firefox 4 Beta, PPAs proved to be a very convenient solution. They get all the fresh updates and getting the latest Beta was as easy as running a regular system update. Nothing is perfect, though, and the use of a daily PPA is no exception. In this type of PPAs activity is frantic, so the amount of updates users get from them can get annoying. Aside from that, because this daily PPA was good for all Mozilla's products, chances are you won't be able to keep Thunderbird stable, but have to install and use Shredder instead, the development branch.

Well, if you struggled with any of those little (or perhaps not so little) annoyances, you will surely love to hear that Firefox 4.0 is now available at the Mozilla stable PPA for both Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 10.04 and derivatives.

Before proceeding with its installation, though, I would recommend removing any previous Firefox installation, specially if they are not stable ones. Along the same lines, it would be smart to disable or remove the Mozilla daily PPA in cause it was in use, just to prevent any potential conflicts or a messy setup in the long run. Once ready to install, just follow these simple instructions:

Open a terminal and add the Mozilla stable PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Now update and install:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox

Note that, by adding the Mozilla stable PPA, you will also have access to other stable releases, such as Thunderbird 3.1.

Now go ahead and have fun with Firefox 4.0. The reviews I have read so far seem to confirm it is a huge improvement over previous releases, and while start up times are still a bit slow, browsing speed is getting pretty damn close to Google Chrome/Chromium's, albeit with a much better Linux integration!