Install Firefox 57 on CentOS 6.5

Question

I did the following steps to install Firefox 57 on CentOS 6.5 :

1) wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-57.0.tar.bz2

2) tar xvjf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2

3) sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

4) firefox

I get the following Error:

libgtk-3.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Couldn't load XPCOM.

Is it possible to install Firefox 57 on CENTOS 6.5 ?

Solution

To handle this kind of error in general, you need to search the database for the missing file. To begin with, you need to update the database by

sudo yum makecache

After that you can search for the target file

yum provides "*/libgtk-3.so.0"

You will find that you need a package named gtk3, now install it

sudo yum install gtk3

Now you should have the libgtk-3.so.0 file located in /usr/lib64.

There are rare cases that a shared object file is not installed to the default location and you need to manually tell the system where to find it. You can achieve this by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Although in this case, this step is completely unnecessary because /usr/lib64 is one of the default locations to search for shared object files.

Comments

[GAD3R]

check the Firefox 57.0.4 System Requirements

[Anu Chawla]

But It is mentioned here ( centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50463) that it is not possible to install gtk3 on CentOS 6.5.

[Weijun Zhou]

The thread does not explain why it is impossible, and yes I admit that I am using CentOS 7. If the above method really doesn't work for you. You can either add custom repo, download rpm from rpm-hosting sites and manually installing them, or compile from source.

[Ranjith's]

@WeijunZhou Could you please update the answer with the above mentioned approch.. it's reallly helpful.

[Weijun Zhou]

I cannot be sure about the detailed procedures until I can try that out myself. But you can follow the general procedure of adding ppa repositories or compiling from source tarballs.

[rubo77]

to ignore flatpak and snap in the search use locate libgtk-3.so.0|egrep -v 'flatpak|snap'|grep -e 'so.0$'

[rubo77]

This worked: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./firefox-portable (installed with this script: gist.github.com/rubo77/b999c1bc6d10ab802536 )