From ATLAS-TRIUMF

If you don't want an ancient, possibly insecure, and feature-poor older thunderbird / firefox but don't want to try to find proper yum repo installs for the new version, this method is OK for one desktop:

Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html (or http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all.html) and find the latest and greatest.

Download it and unpack in the place of your choosing. As root you can make the new version the default for the machine; or as a regular user you can install it just for you.

On my desktop (as root) I put these in /usr/local and then do

mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox-def ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

There were no pre-existing /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop (or same for thunderbird) so I created them:

touch /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop cat > /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop < EOF [Desktop Entry] Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base; Type=Application Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Firefox Comment='WWW browser' Exec='/usr/local/firefox/firefox' Icon='/usr/local/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png' Terminal=false EOF

touch /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop cat > /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop < EOF [Desktop Entry] Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base; Type=Application Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Thunderbird Comment='Mail Client' Exec='/usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird' Icon='/usr/share/pixmaps/thunderbird.png' Terminal=false EOF

(but I'm not sure these are used at all in my setup - the /usr/bin links are the ones that matter).