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That was a smart move by Mozilla making release 24 an extended service release. Avoiding the unnecessary Mochromezilla experience, I'm sticking with (traditional) Firefox 24 ESR for as long as I can.

In Windows, I had the option of stopping the nagging for a particular update. I don't mind modifying scripts or hacking the OS. Please tell me that someone out there knows how to stop the Software Updater from daily asking me to update to the same Firefox release that I do not want, yet still allow me to get the desired system updates.

Without that ability to permanently decline the latest Firefox update, it'll be enough to make me turn off the automatic UBUNTU software update notifications for good.

Thanks for reading.

edit: It turns out that Firefox 25 is OK after all. Mozilla pushed back implementing Australis until next year! http://www.ghacks.net/2013/10/24/firefoxs-australis-design-wont-ship-march-2014/

Michael Clayton
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2 Answers2

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If you want a version different than offered then you should apt-get remove Ubuntu's Firefox and install Firefox ESR yourself, directly from mozilla, outside the package manager. There is no deb package yet for Ubuntu Firefox ESR. If Ubuntu still bothers you about Firefox updates then you need to apt-get remove more stuff.

To install just tar xjf the archive you downloaded, mv and ln -s as you desire (I suggest moving it to /opt/firefox24).

You must run this Firefox install as root to get updates for it. These updates will come directly from mozilla on the ESR channel. If you casually run sudo firefox then root will write into your default profile folder, making it unusable for your regular user until you chown/chmod it back. So make a separate profile for updates with firefox -P.

Community
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Magicianeer
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  • Thank you. Your input was valuable and contains what I need. [Elsewhere](http://askubuntu.com/questions/183319/how-to-completely-remove-firefox-so-it-wont-update} I see that to completely remove Firefox needs a bit more. sudo apt-get --purge autoremove firefox – Michael Clayton Nov 01 '13 at 13:32
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I learned that the dreaded UI changes were delayed, and I was able to keep my system fully up to date through Firefox 28. But now with the advent of Australis in Firefox 29, I had to find a simple answer to my question, and it is: sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en Issuing that command from the terminal causes UBUNTU to maintain the current version of Firefox, while continuing the automatic updates for everything else. No nags, just what the doctor ordered. Once the browser add-on situations are resolved, then I'll use 'unhold' instead of 'hold' in the command to undo the lockdown.

Michael Clayton
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  • You inadvertently answered another question regarding the nagging updating of Firefox. After I marked FF to hold, I kept getting the update prompt to update the English version language pack. With your inclusion of the command, sudo apt-mark hold firefox-locale-en, this too put the brakes on that secondary nag. Thank you for posting. – JamesReece Apr 08 '22 at 13:59