Cannot launch Firefox with Selenium on linux RedHat 5.3

Question

Im new to Linux. I installed a new version of firefox onto my linux machine(extract bz2 to folder). So when i click on the web browser button, it would launch firefox 3.6

However, when i use eclipse/java/selenium to launch the webpage, it launches a seperate version FF 3.0.

So i went ahead and deleted the FF 3.0 from /usr/lib, /usr/lib64 and replaced it w/ ff 3.6. Now i get an error saying failed to connect to binary FireFoxBinary(/usr/bin/firefox) when i load my selenium code.

Please advise, it seems as if selenium is launch the wrong browser and i have noooo idea how to fix it and cannot find any information online.

Answer 1

The Firefox binary requires a handful of shared libraries to run in addition to just the executable. It won't run if they're not installed on your system. The tar.bz2 that you downloaded is meant to be extracted somewhere (to your home directory, for example) and run from that directory. (See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Installing%20Firefox%20on%20Linux for more details)

If you want to install Firefox for users beyond yourself, I'd recommend using what's known as a package manager. On Red Hat, try using the following tool to search for and install Firefox:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Deployment_Guide/ch-graphical-rpm.html

Answer 2

You probably need to link the executable:

sudo unlink /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /path/to/new/firefox/executable /usr/bin/firefox