How to install the latest Firefox version in (K)Ubuntu 14.04 and later

[kyonides]

NOTE

This is not a very complicated procedure. In fact you just need to know how to download files while using your current web browser (any old version of Mozilla Firefox included) and how to move directories from one location to another by means of terminal window commands and change the directory and its files ownership to user root.

Let's get this done quickly.

First of all you should know where to find the latest version of Firefox for Linux. It's right here.

Now you either open your terminal window (Konsole if using Kubuntu) or your file manager (Dolphin on Kubuntu). Then you extract the tar.bz archive to a folder named firefox.

Right after this step enter the following command in the terminal window.

sudo mv /home/user/Downloads/firefox /opt/firefox

or

sudo mv /home/user/Downloads/firefox /opt/firefox-latest

You might want to name the folder as firefox or firefox-latest.

Your current download directory might not be /home/user/Downloads, so just adjust that part to match your actual download directory's location.

The next step would be to change the directory and its files and subdirectories ownership. Right, let's go back to the terminal window and enter...

sudo chown -R root:root /opt/firefox

or

sudo chown -R root:root /opt/firefox-latest

Now the last part would be to create a desktop link so you can quickly open your favorite web browser with a foxy tail.

If you are using Kubuntu, then just copy and paste the one you have for your older version of Firefox or edit the current one to match the actual location of your brand new firey friend

[Kirito]

This is actually unnecessary, unless you want the aurora or nightlies. Ubuntu has been providing the latest versions of firefox for every release starting with 14.04 LTS in their main repositories since last year.

[kyonides]

Things like that aren't quite true, there are exceptions and errors that don't let you update them as expected. In case anybody wanted to use Kubuntu 14.04, 14.10 or 15.04, they should know that sometimes they wouldn't get Firefox 40 or 40.0.3 as you might think because of their KDE version not being the same as Kubuntu 15.10's. The latter will included KDE 5 for the first time as I have read so far on Linux forums. I would still like to verify if backports are working properly but mine didn't even if it didn't prevent my box to update Flash.