Force firefox to use different library

Question

I'm trying to upgrade to Firefox 5 on RHEL5, and am getting the following error:

./firefox-bin: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by /home/isdtc/tdiakiw/bin/firefox5/firefox/libxul.so)

As the computer is a work machine, I don't have access to update the libraries directly. To try and get around this I downloaded the libstdc++.so.6.0.10 library.

strings libstdc++.so.6.0.10 | grep GLIBCXX shows:

GLIBCXX_3.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.1
GLIBCXX_3.4.2
GLIBCXX_3.4.3
GLIBCXX_3.4.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.5
GLIBCXX_3.4.6
GLIBCXX_3.4.7
GLIBCXX_3.4.8
GLIBCXX_3.4.9
GLIBCXX_3.4.10
GLIBCXX_FORCE_NEW
GLIBCXX_DEBUG_MESSAGE_LENGTH

Is there some way of forcing firefox to use this library instead? I have tried adding the directory containing the new library (with a so name) to LD_LIBRARY_PATH and then running, but I'm still getting the same error message

./firefox
+ moz_libdir=/usr/local/lib/firefox-5.0.1
+ found=0
+ progname=./firefox
++ dirname ./firefox
+ curdir=.
++ basename ./firefox
+ progbase=firefox
+ run_moz=./run-mozilla.sh
+ test -x ./run-mozilla.sh
+ dist_bin=.
+ found=1
+ '[' 1 = 0 ']'
+ script_args=
+ debugging=0
+ MOZILLA_BIN=firefox-bin
+ '[' linux = beos ']'
+ pass_arg_count=0
+ '[' 0 -gt 0 ']'
+ '[' 0 = 1 ']'
+ exec ./run-mozilla.sh ./firefox-bin
./firefox-bin: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by xxxxxxxxxxxxx/firefox/libxul.so)

Answer 1

Firefox ships a shell script that is usually place in /usr/bin/firefox and that does some setup and starts the real binary, usually /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin. (Obviously these paths will be different since you're installing it in your home directory, though.) In that case, the shell script might be overriding LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Check it and make sure it isn't and try adding your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to it.

I presume you're using the official binaries from mozilla.com. It might be easier to download the source code and compile it (assuming you have the necessary tools installed on your system), because if Firefox doesn't actually doesn't need libstdc++ 6.0.10, but wants it because that's what Mozilla happened to compile it against, you may be able to successfully compile it to use the version installed on your system instead. There are detailed instructions for building Firefox on the Mozilla Developer Center website.