Switching to Firefox 2 on Ubuntu 8.04

If you installed Ubuntu 8.04 (nicknamed Hardy Heron) and have had troubles with Firefox 3 Beta, you can remove it and install Firefox 2 instead by following these steps.

Point-and-Click Method

Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and enter your password.

Note: you cannot remove Firefox 3 via Applications > Add/Remove, as you will get a warning about it supposedly removing essential components.

Once Synaptic has opened, click Search or press Control-F and then do a search for firefox.

In the search results, you should see both firefox-2 and firefox-3.0. Right-click firefox-2 and mark it for installation.

Right-click firefox-3.0 and mark it for removal. You'll be asked to remove firefox, firefox-3.0-gnome-support, and firefox-gnome-support.

Note: It's okay to remove these. If, however, you get nervous about removing these "essential components," you can still install Firefox 2 without removing Firefox 3; it'll just take up extra disk space, which you may have in abundance.

Whether you decided to remove Firefox 3 or not, you should still have Firefox 2 marked for installation, so go ahead and click Apply to apply your marked changes. Click Apply again when prompted to confirm the changes.

Wait for the changes to happen and click Close when they're done.

Firefox 2 Web Browser should now appear in your Applications > Internet menu.

If you removed Firefox 3 also, you may notice that the panel launcher for Firefox is missing an icon (all you get is a black shiny box). You can remove that empty launcher if you want by right-clicking it and selecting remove from panel.

You can also add Firefox 2 Web Browser to the panel by right-clicking it and selecting add launcher to panel.

Once Firefox is launched, you can check that it really is Firefox 2 by going to Help > About Mozilla Firefox.

Command-line Method
Paste this command into the terminal:

sudo apt-get remove firefox-3.0 && sudo apt-get install firefox-2