Firefox Legacy version 56.0.2

The latest Firefox version 57 and above, a.k.a Firefox Quantum, it is fast, but… that is not what I need.

As a developer, I favoured Chromium more than Firefox. And I use Firefox mainly for downloading. The addon DownThemAll is the must. The greatest feature I love is the ability to highlight and download the selected hyperlinks as batch. And I can name the downloaded files by original filename or based on the text in HTML.

[caption id=“attachment_2229” align=“alignnone” width=“1125”]DownThemAll in Firefox 56 DownThemAll in Firefox 56[/caption]

This is neither Google Chrome nor Firefox Quantum can do.

With Firefox Quantum, there is no more support for legacy addons. As a result, unless the addon developers update their project, nothing more we can do. We can either install other Firefox variants such as Firefox ESR, Waterfox, Palemoon, etc (as suggested by one of the DTA reviewers). In my opinion, with WebExtensions API, DTA developer may face some issues to develop for Quantum support.

I tried to install Firefox ESR (which is actually 52.5.0) in order to use DTA. However, it is extremely slower comparing to Firefox 56. When Firefox 54 was released, it was the best Firefox ever and it was really fast comparing to the older versions. Therefore, in order to use the latest Firefox that supports legacy addon, I choose to install Firefox 56 without removing the latest Firefox Quantum.

How to install older Firefox (for Linux only)?

  1. Use Google to search an older Firefox, you should get a URL like this: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0.2/
  2. Choose the link (directory) that matches your target machine, Windows 32-bit / 64-bit, Linux 32-bit / 64-bit, etc. Then choose a language that you prefer. For my case, I downloaded Firefox 56.0.2 for Linux 64-bit.
  3. Download and extract it to some location, such as /opt/firefox56.

Now, you should able to invoke Firefox 56 by (but don’t run it now)

[code lang=“text”] /opt/firefox56/firefox [/code]

Run the above command will use the same profile as your default Firefox (if you installed Firefox Quantum).

Create another profile

Your Firefox profile should locate at ~/.mozilla/firefox/, named as xxxxx.profilename.

(NOTE: Suggest to make a backup of your default profile.)

Easiest way to create another profile for another version of Firefox,

  1. Create a new profile using command firefox -ProfileManager. Because this will update profile.ini as well.
  2. Exit Firefox Profile Manager.
  3. Locate to the directory of the profile, then delete all the files and directories within the profile, i.e, make it empty. (NOTE: Do not delete your default profile.)
  4. Copy all the files and directories of your default profile to the empty profile in step 3.
  5. Now you can run Firefox with the new profile, like /opt/firefox56/firefox -P profilename.

Create shortcut (application menu, aka desktop entries, for Linux only)

Because the Firefox we installed is just by extracting. There is no desktop entry file created. Therefore, we need to create our own desktop entry file. This can be done by creating a file as ~/.local/shared/applications/firefox-legacy.desktop.

The following is the content,

[code lang=“text”] Name=Firefox Legacy GenericName=Web Browser Icon=firefox Type=Application Categories=Application;Network; MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;text/mml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https; Encoding=UTF-8 Exec=/opt/firefox56/firefox -P legacy %u Terminal=false MultipleArgs=false StartupNotify=false StartupWMClass=Firefox [/code]

where the /opt/firefox56/firefox -P legacy %u, with the legacy as the profile name. You can modify this line to your target profile name.

Then, restart your gnome-panel or whatever panel, it should generate this menu item named as Firefox Legacy. Now, you can run two different versions of Firefox simultaneously.

(Side note: Wordpress with Markdown mode enabled is the best!)