358084 - create detailed (step-by-step, with pictures!) installation instructions for Firefox

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

While monitoring mozilla.feedback i see some Feedback from Users, complaining about the Installation instructions on the Firefox 2 Release Notes.

"I'm taken to a section of text that does not actually contain ANY
installation instructions.  The text says that 2.0 will overwrite any
previous installation, but it contains no actual instructions on how to
install it."

"there aren`t any actualy step - by step instructions!!!!"

"Why not say right upfront what has to be done? "

"The above web page gives absolutely no info on how to actually install
the product for any system/platform.  All that is present is a warning
which appears to be leftover from the RC phase. This is not very user
friendly and needs to be corrected immediately."

This is some Feedback. Maybe we need to think about a step by step guide for new User to Firefox on Linux/Windows/Mac

Comment 1

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

This also is a Issue for a lot of Linux User.

"i am a beginner in linux and wanted to install the newest version of FF.
So i took a look at the help pages hoping that there are some
information about this issue. In help pages the answer of the question
how to install firefox was, pleaese refer to the release notes for
detailled information.  And the release notes tell "Please note that
installing Firefox 2 will overwrite your existing installation of
Firefox." and nothing more !!??

So, how can i install firefox under linux ?
and if you just didn't think about giving information about installing
firefox, why did you ad the chapter "installing firefox" to your FAQ ? 
do you sell us (esp. beginners) for fool or just want to drive us crazy?
How can we gather information about your product, if even you - the
official site - don't give any ?"

I see a lot of such comments and they are also confused about how to install firefox on linux..

The readme.txt from the linux.tar only contain "For information about installing, running and configuring Firefox 
including a list of known issues and troubleshooting information, 
refer to: http://getfirefox.com/releases/"

Comment 2

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

*** Bug 361043 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

Request blocking 1.8.1.4 since this is still an issue in hendrix.

Comment 5

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

--> deb

Comment 7

[Cees T.]

Adding a link to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_Firefox would help a lot.

Comment 8

[Steffen Wilberg]

The release notes for trunk alphas is much more verbose:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a8/releasenotes/#install
Why don't we copy that to the 2.x release notes?

Comment 9

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> The release notes for trunk alphas is much more verbose:
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a8/releasenotes/#install
> Why don't we copy that to the 2.x release notes?

Because they're not very good, really.

I think we need to create better, per-platform install instructions with images and a bit more detail, and have that as a page which can be linked to from all release notes, first run pages, etc.

We probably also want to update the readme file in the Linux tar files - is there a bug on that? I'd support updating that file to contain the linux specific text that's at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0a8/releasenotes/#install

Comment 10

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

This is me. 

Comment 11

[Henri de Solages]

As explained by "CT" in Bug 361043, the best (and very easy) way to solve quickly this problem is to change the URI given in README.txt and readme.txt to this one:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_Firefox
as far as installation in concerned.
The only problem I noticed in that page is that, in Mandrivalinux, the symbolic link to firefox shouldn't be placed in /usr/local/bin/ but in /usr/bin/ .

Comment 12

[Tony Chung [:tchung]]

Asa, will you be working on this for firefox 3?  it affects the current Fx3 betas as well  (eg. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b4/releasenotes/#install)

It'd be good to have these instructions ready prior to our launch of firefox 3, as well as fixed for Firefox 2.x as well.  

Comment 13

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

No. This bug needs a different owner. I won't be working on release notes for Firefox 3. 

Comment 15

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

I'll take this for now, since it's release note-related, but I'm not sure what we'll do on Linux. We should definitely do something for Windows and Mac though.

Comment 16

[Mumia W.]

Attachment: Preliminary README for Linux (no pictures, sorry)

Comment 17

[Mumia W.]

I hope someone can HTML-ize and picture-prettify the README_LINUX.txt I just posted. That file was more meant for the installation package, so I think I should have posted it to bug 463233. Oh well, it can't hurt here.

Comment 18

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Alix: This is the bug I was talking about previously.

Comment 19

[Alix Franquet [:alix]]

We're revising the Windows (Bug 479462) and Mac (Bug 479463) instructions and screenshots for download.html (the page you see after you click on the download button), so you could just copy those.
Linux and all others get a new version of the "default" page we're currently showing.
Unsupported OSes we can detect get a page warning them that it probably won't work for them.

We also refer people to SUMO's installing Firefox page if they would like more detailed instructions, so that page might be the best place for you to link to: 
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Installing+Firefox

Adding Tenser to the thread to see how SUMO content can help here.

Comment 20

[Henri de Solages]

I download Firefox from here
http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html#en-GB
and can't see any installation instruction neither any link to such necessary instructions. Where are the pages you're talking about?

Mumia, your instructions are interesting and clear, but you don't say
1) what to do if there is an older version of Firefox installed,
2) how to install several language versions of Firefox,
3) whether or not "root" or each user will have to do something to choose the language(s) they want to use Firefox in if there are several languages installed.

Comment 21

[Mumia W.]

(In reply to comment #20)
> I download Firefox from here
> http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html#en-GB
> and can't see any installation instruction neither any link to such necessary
> instructions. Where are the pages you're talking about?
> 

The installation instructions are on the way.

> Mumia, your instructions are interesting and clear, but you don't say
> 1) what to do if there is an older version of Firefox installed,
> 2) how to install several language versions of Firefox,
> 3) whether or not "root" or each user will have to do something to choose the
> language(s) they want to use Firefox in if there are several languages
> installed.

Thanks for the feedback. For 1), I'll try to make it clear that an older version can be kept in another location. For 2) and 3), I don't exactly know the answers since I've never had multiple FX language versions installed.

I suspect that people would install the several versions in different locations, e.g.:

en_BG:      /usr/local/firefoxes/firefox.en_GB
es_MX:      /usr/local/firefoxes/firefox.es_MX
fr_CA:      /usr/local/firefoxes/firefox.fr_CA

How the user selects which FX to run gets a little too complicated, but he or she could create shell scripts that run the various versions of FX, e.g. firefox-en_GB.sh. Does this make sense to anyone?

Comment 22

[Mumia W.]

Hmm, someone needs to help me think of how we deal with profile conflicts between the different Firefoxes.

Comment 23

[Mumia W.]

Attachment: Preliminary README changed: Deals with keeping different versions of Firefox on the machine

Comment 24

[Mumia W.]

I hope that the file I uploaded could be named README_LINUX.txt in the package.

Comment 25

[Henri de Solages]

Thank you very much. The thing to add explicitly is that one has to change the name of the old executive
/usr/local/firefox/firefox
file BEFORE creating the new one by uncompression-extraction,
then to change the name of the new one (probably before executing it, right?)
BEFORE uncompressing a possible 2nd language one, etc..
Let it be simple: is there any advantage in renaming the directory "firefox" into "firefoxes" as you implicitly propose to do it?
Reading your solution, I guess Firefox profile manager doesn't manage different languages. This would be an improvement, rather than manual symbolic links.

Comment 26

[Henri de Solages]

And naming your "notes", not only numbering them, would be an improvement.

Comment 27

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

The instructions for Linux could use a couple (maybe three) user scenarios according to distribution. There should not be much difference: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, or whathaveyou could be used for this. And maybe we should also include some notes for common errors and how to fix them.

Comment 28

[Mumia W.]

Attachment: added note names and comment about moving away other FX versions

Comment 29

[Henri de Solages]

Attachment: Added step-by-step instructions for multiple installation.

Comment 30

[Henri de Solages]

However, there is a problem on my Mandriva Linux 2008 KDE 3.5.7: the new
versions use an older bookmarks file of mine than the one I'd been using for
months with Firefox 2. And I couldn't find were Firefox 3 stores its bookmarks
so I couldn't substitute this file with the most recent one.
This might be du to the fact that I vainly tried to install Firefox 3 a few
months ago (And I don't remember exactly what I did then.).

Another strange point is that if a version of Firefox (2 or 3) is running,
launching another one just opens a new window of the already running version,
rather than opening in parallel the version you want to.

Comment 31

[Henri de Solages]

Attachment: Corrected mistakes.

Comment 32

[Mumia W.]

Attachment: copyedits, rearrange author names

Comment 33

[Mumia W.]

Attachment: Copy edits, added note about Iceweasel

Comment 34

[[:Aleksej]]

(In reply to comment #33)
> Created an attachment (id=367431) [details]

Why is this:
“Now comes the tricky part. Whenever Firefox is installed from a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file, it must first be run as a user with privileges to modify the application directory (/usr/local/firefox in this example).”

I have never been doing that (hopefully) with Firefox 2 or 3, and it worked.

I just create symlinks to the file “firefox”.

Comment 36

[peter_jonson]

I wasted many hours because there was no link to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_Firefox. It was suggested in comment #7, more than 2 years 2 months ago. It is only a short link, why should it take so long to add it to the 'README.txt' file in the top level directory of the linux release? If this was Wikipedia it would just have been added as soon as someone thought of it.

Currently there is no installer, no 'INSTALL' file, and the 'README.txt' file just says 'For information about installing, running and configuring Firefox
including a list of known issues and troubleshooting information,
refer to: http://getfirefox.com/releases/'. That page does not have install instructions, indeed the word 'install' does not appear, and it does not seem to have a link to any install instructions.

I tried running 'firefox' from where it was, after unpacking the tar file, and it crashed. As far as I knew this was because I had not found and followed the install instructions. So I basically had to try all sorts of things, or give up.

This bug should be marked 'Critical' until at least something has been done, because it is capable of preventing people using firefox.

Comment 37

[Cees T.]

Or http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Installing+Firefox which i found by using the new search feature on Customer Support page linked from the generic page i get redirected to from the old URL. It looks less intimidating to newbs than http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_Firefox

This bug looks FIXED to me. I'll file a new one to request a link from the release notes.

Comment 38

[Cees T.]

Filed bug 591319 - Release notes' installation instructions incomplete.

For the README.txt issue, see bug 361043 - readme.txt doesn't contain installation instructions.

Comment 39

[Laura Forrest]

We're doing a bit of bug triage house-keeping here and came across this. 

Closing this bug for now since this looks fixed and step by step instructions are on www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox. Re-open if you think otherwise. 

Thanks!

Comment 40

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Attachment: Screenshot

Not trying to be difficult, but where on the page are these step-by-step instructions? I don't see anything resembling steps on that page.

(Semi-related, the "Need Download Help" link just goes to support.mozilla.com not to a specific "download help" page on that site. Intentional?)

Comment 41

[John Slater]

A few thoughts here:
- we're cleaning out old bugs, and this seems like a likely candidate for closing or, perhaps better, refiling with a more focused action.
- I doubt that this bug is preventing very many people from installing Firefox, since the biggest group of our users (the ones who might need help like this) don't even know the release notes page exists. People who are browsing release notes pages most likely know how to install Firefox.
- since this bug was originally filed, we've added step by step instructions to the post-download page, which is what Laura was alluding to in comment #39, which is a more relevant spot for them anyway.
- seems like the better bug is to add a link to the specific SUMO page for download page from the release notes. If you want to file that, we can definitely add it to the queue for the near future.

I still think we can resolve this.

Comment 42

[Henri de Solages]

Mozilla is a wonderful world. We fill a bug, we vote for it, we solve it, writing the needed step-by-step instructions. Several years later, after losing again several hours trying to install the new version of Firefox, not to avail, I'm back to this bug. Although we did the work, there is not the slightest improvement! but the bug has been closed!! As far as the link given in comment #39, not only there are no installation instructions there, but even the word "install" or "installation" doesn't appear, and I could find no link to any installation instructions from there.
  Ah, yes, there IS indeed a, big, improvement: now, we are free to shift to Chromium. Maybe that project will be a bit more serious.

Comment 43

[Mumia W.]

This bug still affects people, and the software is technically somewhat incomplete without a proper readme file containing install instructions--even if a website seems to help.

The file README_LINUX.txt, prepared by Henri and me, is ready to go. All we need is for someone with the proper authority to place it into Firefox.

Comment 44

[Mumia W.]

Someone needs to re-open this bug. It's too bad that I can't do that.