Upgrading to Firefox2 using Ubuntuzilla

Since official support for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 expires at the end of June 2007, I decided to upgrade to Firefox 2.0. There are no official packages for Firefox 2.0 for Dapper Drake, so I followed the excellent instructions provided by Ubuntuzilla for installing the latest versions of Mozilla's Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird.

At this stage I was only interested in upgrading Firefox, so I downloaded the ubuntuzilla.py script and ran

python ~/Desktop/ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox

As noted, it is important to not uninstall the existing version of Firefox 1.5.

From now on I can simply use Firefox 2.0's built-in update mechanism to keep Firefox up-to-date.

I noticed two minor drawbacks resulting from the upgrade:

1. Font rendering is not as attractive in Firefox 2.0 as it was in 1.5
2. Sound in the Flash plug-in does not work if another audio application, e.g. Rhythmbox is being used. I must first exit all audio applications and restart Firefox to get sound working in the Flash plug-in. This was not the case in Firefox 1.5